Portuguese researcher wins the "Ariel Machine Learning Data Challenge"

Portuguese researcher Luís F. Simões has won the "Ariel Machine Learning Data Challenge", a worldwide Artificial Intelligence competition for the study of exoplanets launched by the European Space Agency (ESA). Luís F. Simões set out to create the best algorithm for the Ariel mission that the ESA will launch in 2028, a mission to which Portugal subscribes.

Luís F. Simões was awarded an FCT doctoral scholarship at the 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 aimed at developing 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 atmosphere 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 is beyond us. 

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