ZHAW to host the 9th edition of the Swiss SKA Days

(CONNECT) According to its press release, ZHAW is expecting more than 100 national and international participants to attend the 9th edition of the Swiss SKA Days, which is set to take place August 25-27. The engineers and researchers from numerous countries are involved in the construction of the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO), which is the world’s largest and most modern radio telescope. At the event, they will exchange information on the status of their work, while representatives from the global SKAO headquarters at the Jodrell Bank Centre of the University of Manchester are also expected to be in attendance.

“The SKAO is a next-generation radio astronomy-driven Big Data facility that will revolutionize our understanding of the Universe and the laws of fundamental physics”, according to the SKAO website. “Enabled by cutting-edge technology, it promises to have a major impact on society, in science and beyond”, the website continues.

Construction of the SKAO began last year and will take a total of eight years. It involves two complementary sites in Australia and South Africa, operational locations and the headquarters. The SKA Days will feature presentations on the status of this international project, with various project groups from the SKA Switzerland Consortium (SKACH) also set to showcase their work there.

“We also collaborate with the University of Zurich, which is in charge of providing the simulations, the FHNW, which is developing a digital twin of the actual telescope, and other institutions such as ETH Zurich, EPFL, University of Basel, University of Geneva, the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS)”, as Elena Gavagnin of ZHAW states in a blog interview with her university. Together with Frank-Peter Schilling and Philipp Denzel, she is contributing her expertise in the areas of AI and machine learning to the consortium in the ZHAW research project entitled GenAI4SKA.

“When the SKAO telescopes begin operations, they will produce an overwhelming volume of data – far more than any human could study in a lifetime”, comments Denzel in the same interview. “Our models could help process this flood of information autonomously, building theoretical representations of galaxies and flagging the most exciting discoveries for closer investigation”. ce/mm