University professor - research in gravitational waves, black holes, and applied statistics.
We just had a fun social activity with our research group. We all went swimming in Lake Iseo! It’s one of the lakes in Northern Italy; this spot specifically, called Zorzino. There were quite a lot of us! Myself; Tristan, Ssohrab, and Alex (postdocs); Matilde, Matteo, and Giulia (PhD students); and Emma, Martina, Giulia, Lisa, Alessia, Rocco, and Sofia (all MSc students). Chiara and Federico were…
Three more students graduated with projects with us in July…
Applications are open for the Italian National PhD in AI:
I recently had some fun setting up a bot that sends automatic reminders for our group seminars (if you’ve ever done it, you know that remembering to send seminar emails is a pain). Let me share it here in case it is useful to others:
Last week we had a nice conference here at Milano-Bicocca, centered on the new BiCoQ initative which brings together activites in gravity and particles in our department. Among the invited speakers we had Steve Fairhurst (Cardiff, LVK Spokesperson), Nora Luetzgendorf (ESA, LISA project scientist), and Uli Sperhake (Cambridge, numerical relativity).
Correlations are the new populations. After GW population analyses have (kind of) nailed down the marginal distributions of masses, spins, and redshift, the focus is now shifting to correlations between two or more parameters. Here, we take a step back and use a simple toy model to understand how correlations (or fake evidence for correlations) can emerge in hierarchical Bayesian statistics when…
We have a 3G paper today, led by Federico Leto di Priolo (recent MSc graduate here) and also featuring a new collaboration with Martyna Chruślińska from ESO. A 3G detector will see black holes at high redshift, which means they will come from stars with different properties—namely, stars with low metallicity. Now, how far should you look if you’re specifically interested in the low-metallicity…
In the past few months, we’ve been setting up a new computer cluster called redfive (why redfive?…). Right now, it consists of a login node and five compute nodes, totaling about 100 CPUs. It is developed and maintained entirely in-house (mostly by Rodrigo Tenorio and Federico De Santi, while I prepare coffee during their admin sessions!), which is great fun. It’s not meant to substitute a…
Uninformative priors are good because they’re uninformative, right? Not really. We argue they’re bad because they are uninformative, i.e. they leave out information. Now, that’s the best you can do if you don’t have that information, but if you do and decide to ignore it, then it becomes your fault. This is the case in our beloved GW astronomy. When we analyze a GW event, we do have some…
Yeee! Alice Spadaro got her PhD yesterday! She defended her PhD thesis titled “Methods for exploiting gravitational-wave data from massive black-hole binaries.” The thesis was refereed by Laura Blecha and James Alvey, and the defense committee had John Veitch, Enrico Barausse, and Massimo Dotti. They had many, many (many!) questions because Alice’s thesis was just too interesting! Alice will be…