This morning I participated in the Astronomy and Astrophysics group Science Jamboree 2016, where I managed to win a prize (chocolates!) for the best talk. I’m not quite sure how I managed it, since in the midst of a series of informative and engaging talks, I performed a silly little poem;

For my science Jamboree I’ll tell you a bit about me My journey through physics in a few clumsy limericks Right through to my PhD

I was born in July ‘91 In the blistering east Norfolk sun And… oh wait a minute, there’s a strict time limit So I had best be getting along

We’ll skip ahead 18 odd years Whilst I, still wet ‘round the ears kicked off my degree, eager to see, How I felt after 2 dozen beers

But I did learn some physics as well Einsten, Newton, Maxwell But as some of you know, not a lot of astro Although I think you can probably all tell

To be honest I found space a bit dreary I preferred condensed matter theory my vague proclivity for superconductivity “I should do a PhD in this clearly!”

Alas, I left those low temperatures And became a software developer but the real world is crap I resolved to come back And I somehow became an Astronomer…

My first project involved an obsession with continuous autoregression take an impulse response to stochastic nonsense et voila! banded matrix compression!

And with that O(n) inference Time to write a paper of significance! Except instabilities destroy all utility Try selling that at a conference!

So my PhD project, take 2! But what was I going to do? I felt it was prudent to become Ilya’s student since bless him, he’s only got a few

Binary population synthesis; i.e how did it end up like this? which hyperparameters make a chirp that glamorous? The combinations seem virtually limitless

So here’s where I come in When parameter space coverage is thin we can interpolate perhaps extrapolate what happens when things spiral in

Now this work isn’t finished yet Ive tried random forests and neural nets but despite all my labour it seems nearest neighbours may well be our safest bet

To conclude my science Jamboree I’ll make a short summary my project got switched because CARMA’s a bitch and I write really shit poetry!