The awarded QUIMAL project has the purpose of acquiring equipment to improve the facilities and capacities of CAOVA.
DEALT – «Artificial Intelligence for Adaptive Optics: Deep Learning Wavefront Sensing for Extremely Large Telescopes», is the QUIMAL 20006 that will last for 3 years and got funding of US $250K provided by the Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (ANID).
It was awarded by Dr. Esteban Vera, our director, and also the Professor Darío Pérez, from the PUCV’s School of Electrical Engineering and the Physics Institute respectively.
What is the project about?
The focus is to improve the capacities of the Center for Adaptive Optics of Valparaíso (CAOVA) with technology for the development of Artificial Intelligence (IA) techniques.
This research center, one of a kind in Chile, aims to provide young and senior researchers the opportunity to make cutting-edge contributions in adaptive optics with state of the art infrastructure and technology.
Adaptive optics is the technique that allows to correct atmospheric turbulence, getting high-resolution images of the cosmos. However, this technology presents several complications and also a high cost when it’s applied in ever larger telescopes.
This is the reason we are researching the use of Deep Learning based on AI to develop new optic systems that allow to improve the sensitivity and performance of the Extremely Large Telescopes (ELTs) that will be installed in Chile starting from 2023, which will grant, for example, the possibility of taking and making images of exoplanets.
To put AI solutions into application, is necessary to train it and for that, we require great computational equipment that gives us a chance to do it at a competitive speed. That is why the acquisition of powerful last-generation GPU servers is essential to be able to carry out the project and thanks to the QUIMAL funding it is becoming a reality.
In this way, progress will be made in the development of innovative optical systems for adaptive optics, collaborating with institutions of great renown like the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille (LAM) and the University of Tokyo, turning CAOVA in the Chilean referent in this matter.
