Chi-kwan Chan

Computational Astrophysicist | Tinker | Hiker | Photographer | Dad

[Chi-kwan Chan @rndsrc]

During the @ehtelescope Comrade/HOPS Workshop, we visited the @StewardAstro's Kitt Peak 12m Radio Telescope and the @KittPeakNatObs.

[Chi-kwan Chan @rndsrc]

We organized an @ehtelescope Comrade/HOPS Workshop at @uarizona. It was a great success and people had a lot of fun! We now have a core group of people for EHT data processing and imaging. ;-)

[Chi-kwan Chan @rndsrc]

Hina heads to Harvard before PhD in the UK. Vadim won Outstanding + Research awards and move to Princeton. Rohin and Hayden M. are off to PhD programs, Nayera to IBM, and Ram to a UF REU. Hayden F. got Teaching Award, Jasmin did EHT MOVIE, and Boris organizes EHT workshop. Proud!

[Chi-kwan Chan @rndsrc]

The EHT MOVIE campaign wrapped up last night!

Since Mar 10, EHT observed M87* over 17 nights (our longest campaign yet) with the goal of creating the first video of a black hole.

Huge thanks to the global EHT team and observatories. Excited for the work ahead!

[Chi-kwan Chan @rndsrc]

4 students (ages 9-13) explored SAIR Foundation’s Math Distillation Challenge. They taught themselves bits of abstract algebra, built on others’ work, and just kept pushing. They ranked #66/310 globally and Top 25 on the hardest datasets. That’s... kind of wild.

[Chi-kwan Chan @rndsrc]

We ran a Hackathon on Agentic Coding for Research with a fun group: ~ 25 participants from astronomy, planetary science, physics, and applied math. In 4 hours, we went from an intro to using tools like OpenAI Codex on real problems. By the end, participants shared 10 projects.

[Event Horizon 'Scope @ehtelescope]

Eleven telescopes.
Countless scientists, engineers, and operators.
One goal: a movie of the black hole in M87.

The M87 MOVIE campaign is now underway.

Follow along as the campaign unfolds.
#M87Movie

[Aditya Agarwal @adityaag]

https://t.co/eOZqVE32JH

[Chi-kwan Chan @rndsrc]

Self-play reinforcement learning ...

[Harley Anime✨ @dbs_10_10]

Piccolo made a clone of himself to train
The definition of Me vs Me😭😭

[Chi-kwan Chan @rndsrc]

End of a busy semester: celebrating undergrad Hina Suzuki’s Outstanding Senior Award, then traveling to Phoenix for grad student Ningyuan Xu’s excellent talk at the Texas Symposium. Very proud of both of them.

[Chi-kwan Chan @rndsrc]

This is the time of year when we bring our students to the University of Arizona’s High Performance Computing Center. The students got in the server room for an up-close look at the supercomputers that power so much of our research. Always a highlight of the semester!

[Chi-kwan Chan @rndsrc]

Wow! Cleo Abram and Mark Rober visited Steward Observatory's Mt. Lemmon/Catalina Station and discussed the Catalina Sky Survey: https://t.co/CtzQzZLLPl

[Chi-kwan Chan @rndsrc]

Went to Los Alamos again and talked about AI, multi-physics simulations, and fusion, and stopped by the VLA on our way back to Tucson.

[Chi-kwan Chan @rndsrc]

With Nobel Laureate Brian Schmidt ;-)

[Chi-kwan Chan @rndsrc]

Returned from OpenAI. Lots of interesting ideas shared on the future of AI in education and scientific discovery.

[Chi-kwan Chan @rndsrc]

After our local EHT meeting last week, we stopped by the Arizona Radio Observatory labs. Fascinating to see the cutting-edge instruments up close!

[Chi-kwan Chan @rndsrc]

First Images from the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory:

https://t.co/uG0DJvp0AZ

P.S. The 8.4-meter mirror was fabricated at the Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab at UA https://t.co/DHAUVmXyY5 ;-)

[Event Horizon 'Scope @ehtelescope]

Did you know that black holes are spinning?🌀🔎 To find out just how fast, EHT researchers used AI to connect simulated data to actual EHT measurements of M87 and SgrA*.

They found that the black hole in SgrA* spins almost as fast as physically possible! https://t.co/cWHYTVlbYS

[Phys.org @physorg_com]

#A #NeuralNetwork trained on millions of synthetic data sets indicates the Milky Way’s central black hole spins near its maximum rate, with its axis oriented toward Earth. @AandA_journal https://t.co/V8bsh0g4HT https://t.co/oTMmWUwjyI

[Chi-kwan Chan @rndsrc]

In python,

for i in range(-3,2):
print(f'hash({i:2}) == {hash(i):2}')

hash(-3) == -3
hash(-2) == -2
hash(-1) == -2 🤯
hash( 0) == 0
hash( 1) == 1

And this is not a bug: https://t.co/9iwVFDwxNM