Portuguese researcher wins the Ariel Machine Learning Data Challenge

Portuguese researcher Luís F. Simões won theAriel Machine Learning Data Challenge, a global artificial intelligence competition for the study of exoplanets launched by the European Space Agency (ESA). Luís F. Simões distinguished himself by creating the best algorithm for the Ariel mission that ESA will launch in 2028, a mission that Portugal is supporting.

Luís F. Simões was a FCT doctoral fellow at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, in the field of computational intelligence, and currently runs ML Analytics, an artificial intelligence services company of which he is co-founder.

The Ariel Machine Learning Data Challenge is a competition that aims to develop artificial intelligence techniques to characterize planets orbiting other stars, such as those that will be studied by the Ariel mission, which aims to observe the atmospheres of a thousand exoplanets in order to detect how these systems have developed and how they contextualize our solar system in a galaxy that transcends us. 

Researcher Luís F. Simões has been working on applying Artificial Intelligence to space problems since 2008. The Ariel mission will study the atmosphere and chemistry of a thousand exoplanets. This initiative is particularly complex due to the need to observe planets passing in front of their star, which are sometimes hundreds of light-years away.