What is a scientific instrument?

This is a joint event with the Statistical Society of Australia (SSA) Canberra Branch. The talk will be of 45m presentation plus 15m Q&A.

Title: What is a scientific instrument?
Speaker: Dr. Cheng Soon Ong, Data61, CSIRO
Date/time: 6-7pm Tuesday 11 Oct AEDT
Venue: Online via Zoom. (After RSVP, you will be able to see the link under "Online event" on the right-side panel.)
URL for RSVP:

• Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/CanberraDataSci/events/287343034/
• SSA: https://statsoc.org.au/forum-event-announcements/12937425

Abstract: The process of scientific discovery is an interplay between going
from data to knowledge and vice versa. Advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence have changed the way we analyse data, and hence can be considered a kind of scientific instrument that helps us observe natural phenomenon. This talk looks at some examples of research at CSIRO, illustrating the different ways machine learning is an instrument for scientific discovery. We will focus on high level ideas, and there will be no theorems presented.

Bio: Dr. Cheng Soon Ong is a principal research scientist at the Machine Learning Research Group, Data61, CSIRO, and is the director of the machine learning and artificial intelligence future science platform at CSIRO. He is also an adjunct associate professor at the Australian National University.
His PhD in Computer Science was completed at the Australian National University in 2005. He was a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute of Biological Cybernetics and the Fredrich Miescher Laboratory in Tübingen, Germany. From 2008 to 2011, he was a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich, and in 2012 and 2013 he worked in the Diagnostic Genomics Team at NICTA in Melbourne. Since 2014, Cheng Soon is researching ways to enable scientific discovery by extending statistical machine learning methods with the Machine Learning Research Group in Data61, CSIRO in Canberra. Prior to his PhD, he researched and built search engine and Bahasa Malaysia technologies at Mimos Berhad, Malaysia. He obtained his B.E. (Information Systems) and B.Sc. (Computer Science) from the University of Sydney, Australia.
Homepage: http://www.ong-home.my/