Portuguese researcher wins the “Ariel Machine Learning Data Challenge”

Portuguese researcher Luís F. Simões won the “ Ariel Machine Learning Data Challenge ”, a global Artificial Intelligence competition for the study of exoplanets launched by the European Space Agency (ESA). Luís F. Simões was achieved with the creation of the best algorithm for the Ariel mission that ESA will launch in 2028, a mission that is subscribed by Portugal.

Luís F. Simões was an FCT PhD fellow at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, in the area of computational intelligence, and currently heads ML Analytics, an Artificial Intelligence service provider company of which he is a co-founder.

The “Ariel Machine Learning Data Challenge” is a competition that aims to develop Artificial Intelligence techniques that seek 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 extrasolar planets, in order to detect how these systems have developed, and how they contextualize our solar system in a galaxy that surpasses 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 becomes especially complex due to the need to observe planets passing over their star, which are sometimes hundreds of light years away.