Durham University
Associate Professor of Astronomy
I use the reverberation echo-mapping technique in order to study the inner structure of AGN, in particular, the centrally obscuring dust emitting at infrared wavelengths. Such work involves modeling optical photometric and spectroscopic light curves, which are subsequently smoothed and shifted in order to determine the time delay between time series observed in different frequency bands. Currently, preferred models are based on Gaussian Processes, which we have used successfully and extensively. Now I am interested in exploring the application of other efficient Machine Learning algorithms for time-series analysis (eg., Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and models based on Maximum Entropy).