6957: Seminar on cosmology and selected problems in gravitational lensing research (master in astrophysics)
I used to organise this weekly seminar for over ten year but discontinued this role in 2026. The seminar is now in other good hands to be revamped at some later point. Nevertheless, I am keeping this page for historical reasons.
The main goal of our seminar was, right from the beginning when it had been started by Prof. Peter Schneider in about 2000, to get informed about the work of our colleagues. Another equally important goal was to open students a window to the nitty-gritty details of research and to offer an environment where they could practise their presentation skills.
List of past seminars between 2021 and 2026
A list of talks over the final years follows.
| Date | Speaker | Title of talk |
|---|---|---|
| Apr. 18th | AV (MPA Garching) |
Quenching that shapes the first billion years |
| Feb. 4th | RV | Modeling the Impact of AGNs on the Cross-Correlation of Cosmic Shear and the Diffuse X-ray Background |
(past seminars of 2025 follow from here) |
||
| Nov. 4th | SN (Portsmouth, UK) |
Dark energy and cosmology from 3 years of DESI data (Special Colloquium) |
| Oct. 13th | AD (ICRAR-UWA, Perth, AUS) |
Hot Gas, Cold Gas, and Stars: Mapping the Halo Baryon Budget in the Local Universe |
| Sept. 23rd | ML | The effect of inhomogeneous source distributions on the covariance of second-order shear correlation functions (Master Colloquium) |
| Jul 29th | TB (Utrecht, NL) |
Intrinsic alignment bispectra in Stage IV galaxy surveys from first principles |
| Jun 17th | TM (IfA Edinburgh, UK) |
Constraining Interacting Dark Energy with Large Scale Structure |
| May 20th | DA | Modeling Interlopers Using Higher-Order Statistics for the Euclid Survey (Master Colloq.) |
| May 13th | LP | Towards a cosmic shear analysis using fourth-order statistics |
| Apr 15th | JM | Weak Lensing and the Reconstruction of Convergence and Shear Fields (Bachelor colloquium) |
| Apr 8th | AD | Modelling Interlopers for Two-Point and Three-Point Statistics for Euclid |
| Mar 13th | JJO | Fourth-order galaxy-shear statistics (Master Colloq.) |
| Feb 5th | DC | Testing the impact of realistic galaxy morphology on MomentsML (Master Colloq.) |
| Jan 21th | SU | Effect of blended galaxies and the breakdown of the Born approximation in weak lensing |
| Jan 7th | SH (UC, Santa Cruz, USA) |
First-year cosmology results from DESI |
(past seminars of 2024 follow from here) |
||
| until end 2024 | no seminar | |
| Aug 27th | ER | Towards an application of fourth-order shear statistics (Master Colloq.) |
| July 30th | BB (IfA Edinburgh, UK) |
Towards classifying our Universe with neural networks |
| July 2nd | ML | Investigating the detectability of fourth-order lensing statistics in current surveys |
| Mar 12th | PSt | A Relative Photometric Self-Calibration Procedure for the VIS Instrument on Euclid (Master Colloq.) |
| until Jan 30th | no seminar | |
(past seminars of 2023 follow from here) |
||
| Dec 19th | PSt | cancelled; postponed to Jan/Feb 2024 |
| Dec 12th | AE | postponed to Jan/Feb 2024 |
| Dec 5th | SS | Studying AGN feedbacks in galaxy formation at high redshift (Master Colloq.) |
| Nov 28th | TA | Identification of Protohalos with Deep Learning (Master Colloq.) |
| Nov 7th | DB | Approximate N-body Simulations using Generative AI (Master Colloq.) |
| Oct 17th | SH | The Impact of Masking on the Covariance of second-order Cosmic Shear Statistics (Bachelor Colloq.) |
| Sep 26th | JS (Trieste, IT) |
Systematic uncertainties and covariances for galaxy clustering estimators |
| Aug 29th | PB and LP | Cosmology from second- and third-order shear statistics in the KiDS-1000 data |
| Aug to Oct | summer break (with occasional exceptions) | |
| July 11th | NW | The analytical cross-covariance of the second- and third-order cosmic shear statistics (Master colloq.) |
| July 4th | JB (Kansas State University, USA) |
Modelling of the BAO feature in Bispectrum |
| June 13th | AS (MPE Munich) |
Cosmological implications of the full shape of anisotropic clustering measurements in BOSS and eBOSS |
| May 30th | no seminar (pentecost) | |
| May 23rd | BS | Why dwarf galaxies (don’t) quench? |
| May 16th | KC (Florida, USA) |
Line-Intensity Mapping in Cosmological Hydrodynamic Simulations |
| May 9th | RS (New York, USA) |
Large Scale Structure with Dispersion and Higher Cumulants (virtual) |
| Apr 25th | MK | Investigating the assumptions of the EFTofLSS |
| Apr 18th | RS | Calculating excess mass around KiDS galaxy pairs on large scale with G3L |
| Mar 28th | JD | Improving the PSF-anisotropy correction in Metacalibration shear measurements with machine learning (Master Colloquium) |
| Mar 21st | AN | Accurate gravitational shear estimation with shallow machine learning |
| Mar 14th | CR (University of Vienna) |
Critical phenomena and cosmological perturbations at the extreme |
| Mar 7th | PB | Density split statistic in cosmic shear survey: Generalisation and its application to the Kilo degree survey (PhD colloq.) |
| Feb 21st | no seminar (carneval) | |
| Feb 14th | NW | The covariance between second- and third-order cosmic shear statistics |
| Feb 7th | LL | The covariance of third-order shear statistics |
| Jan 31st | JD | Improving the PSF-anisotropy correction in metacalibration shear measurements |
| Jan 24th | PS | Scientific Writing |
| Jan 11th | SIF (ITA, Oslo, NO) |
Massive galaxy mock production and the use of Big Data frameworks |
| until Jan 10th | no seminars | |
(past seminars of 2022 follow from here) |
||
| Dec 22nd | PS | Euclid VIS calibration |
| Dec 20th | AN (Princeton, USA) |
An informal update on cosmic shear from HSC & the DESC nonlinear bias challenge |
| Nov 22th to Dec 13th | no seminar | |
| Nov 15th | SH | Cosmological parameters from third-order shear statistics |
| Nov 1st | public holiday | |
| Oct 25th | EM | Exploiting the clustering of cosmic voids as a novel cosmological probe |
| August to October | summer break | |
| May 24th | PB | Higher Order Statistics with the density split statistics (virtual) |
| Apr 26th | no seminar (annual EC meeting) | |
| Apr 12th | MK | Testing the assumptions of the EFTofLSS (virtual) |
| Apr 6th (WED) | AN | MomentsML: using supervised learning to get accurate shear estimates (virtual) |
| Mar 29th | EG | Quantifying the Effects of Blended Galaxies in Galaxy Cluster Regions (virtual) |
| Mar 22nd | HZ | An introduction to Metacalibration and its application for Euclid (virtual) |
| Mar 15th | YF | Mechanical feedback from stellar winds with an application to galaxy formation at high redshift (virtual) |
| Feb 3rd | DS | Preparing for weak lensing measurements with the Euclid space probe (virtual) |
(past seminars of 2021 follow from here) |
||
| Feb 2nd | KL | Galaxy Cluster Mass Estimation with CMB Lensing (virtual) |
| Feb 9th | MC | Quantification of CIB contamination into ILC-extracted tSZ maps for two experiments SO and SO+FYST (virtual) |
| Mar 2nd | SH | Modelling cosmic shear from the matter bispectrum (virtual) |
| Mar 9th | MS | How accurately can the weak lensing mass bias be determined? (virtual) |
| Mar 30th | DA | The matter bispectrum: perturbation theory vs. N-body (virtual) |
| Apr 13th | AP | Modeling the void size function and its cosmology dependence in galaxy surveys (virtual) |
| Apr 20th | YN | Master Colloquium: Modified COSEBIs for cosmic shear analaysis (virtual) |
| Jun 15th | JLvB | KiDS-1000 redshifts revisited -- calibration with precision photometric redshifts (virtual) |
| Jul 22nd | DS | Preparing for weak lensing measurements with the Euclid space probe (virtual) |
| Oct 12th | EG | Investigation of Magnification Effects on Source Galaxies in Galaxy-Galaxy Lensing (virtual) |
| Oct 19th | BS | When HeII goes to HeIII, onset and evolution of Helium Reionization (virtual) |
| Oct 26th | AM | Master Colloquium: Measuring kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich signal via peculiar velocity reconstructions (virtual) |
| Nov 2nd | LP | Fast and efficient estimators for weak lensing survey (virtual) |
| Nov 9th | LL | Speeding up calculations -- an introduction to the use of GPUs in scientific computing with examples (virtual) |
| Nov 16th | HZ | Weak lensing mass estimates of the most distant galaxy clusters in the 2500 sq. deg. SPT-SZ Survey (virtual) |
| Nov 23rd | PS | Pure-mode correlation functions, application to KiDS-1000, and ambiguous modes (virtual) |
| Nov 30th | MC | On the road to percent accuracy: The “Reaction” Way (virtual) |
| Dec 7th | AE | A (biased) view on enhancing LSS analyses for next-gen surveys (virtual) |
Seminar archive
Between 2013 and 2026 we were collecting copies from all seminar slides, whenever possible, for our seminar archive.
The archive is only accessible from inside the AIfA though.
In a nutshell: General rules for speakers
This seminar is -- well, no longer -- a great opportunity to practise and improve your presentation skills. Especially graduate and PhD students should seize this opportunity.
Please consider the following guideline for your presentation:
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Aim at a presentation that fits into 30 minutes excluding discussions. All in all, the seminar must not be longer than one hour.
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Focus only on one or two ideas in your talk.
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With more information squeezed into your talk you risk that nothing reaches your audience rather than more.
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If there is more you would like to talk about, just ask for another seminar slot!
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Dedicate the first couple of slides, or the first few minutes of your talk, to a brief, very general introduction (the big idea).
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Imagine talking to friends that work in a totally different trade. Most of your colleagues are not exactly working on stuff you are working on. Importantly, there are likely new students that have never heard about your topic.
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Use one minute for each slide and at least ten minutes for each new idea as rule-of-thumb.