Q&A: What have the stars done for humankind?

Credit: Roberto Trotta - We spoke to Professor Roberto Trotta about his work, his book and what the stars have done for humankind. Professor Roberto Trotta from Imperial College London's Department of Physics is a theoretical physicist by training and astrophysicist by trade. His work explores how statistics and machine learning can help us turn complex datasets from telescopes on Earth and in space into real-life understanding. Almost four years ago, he gave his inaugural lecture at Imperial. Now, he is a Visiting Professor who wants to empower us to appreciate the sky and the stars. His newest book, Starborn , was recently featured as BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week. We spoke to him to find out what the stars, sky and everything in-between bring to humankind, and why we should strive to look after our planet so we can still look up to the stars. Q - When I think of space scientists, machine learning and big data are not what initially spring to mind. Can you explain why we use big data and AI to examine the world above us?. A - Machine learning and artificial intelligence have become essential in learning about our universe. Galileo and others once looked through the telescopes and drew what they saw, and years later at the Harvard Observatory women astronomers inspected hundreds of thousands of stars and galaxies through images. Because of the complexity and sheer scale of the data that we have now, we need computers to extract scientific meaning from the deluge gathered from telescopes in space and on Earth. One of the big cutting-edge frontiers of my field is precisely that. We explore how artificial intelligence (AI) can understand the universe for us. We're getting more and more data all the time, but the question is what does it all mean?