Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF)

The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) is a 47 square degree field of view time-domain survey from the Samuel Oschin 48-inch Schmidt telescope at Palomar Observatory in California. DR2 was released recently (Dec 2019) and boasts of 100 billion source detections in g/r/i filters combined.

I lead the machine learning (ML) for the survey, and the team works on various classification aspects e.g. separating real-bogus sources, identifying streaking asteroids, pigeon holing sources in to their subclasses using advanced statistical and computational methods. Traditional machine learning methods are used for smaller data sets and deep learning (CNNs, generative etc.) when data are plentiful.