Astronomy and astrophysics like many other scientific field is entering the big data era.
Observational instruments such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) and the Square
Kilometre Array (SKA) will produce hundreds of petabytes of data per year supporting many
scientific projects and existing analysis and processing tools will not be sufficient to tackle the
upcoming “big data” challenge. As a consequence a lot of focus has been given to machine
learning techniques both supervised and unsupervised over the past years.
In this talk I will present a case study of galaxies identification using unsupervised learning and
discuss the results evaluation as well as the method application to future astronomical data. In
addition I will give insights about some of the latest machine learning technique being used and
developed within the astronomical community.

Dr. Pierre-Yves Lablanche, born in Saint-Etienne in France, completed a
BSc. in Physics and Chemistry at the Université Jean Monnet in Saint-
Etienne in 2006 and a MSc. in Physics at the Univsersité Lyon 1 in 2008.
He did his Ph.D. in astrophysics between Lyon and the European
Southern Observatory (Münich, Germany) investigating the dynamics of
barred galaxies via N-body simulations until 2012.
The Ph.D. years were followed by two years of work as a scientific
educator in a local association in Saint-Chamond (France) before
volunteering to become a tutor at the African Institute for Mathematical
Sciences (AIMS) in Arusha (Tanzania) in September 2014. A year later
he joined the AIMS research centre in Cape Town (South Africa) where
he is still working as a postdoctoral research fellow.

Although his Ph.D. focused on astrophysics, Pierre-Yves nowadays develop and applies machine
learning techniques in various field such as astronomy, anthropology, text analysis and
infrastructure development. Aside from his research he is involved in many science outreach
activities in France, Tanzania and South Africa and collaborates with the International Astronomical
Union Office of Astronomy for Development on various international projects. Dr. Lablanche more
specifically focuses on activities toward minorities and disabled people humbly trying to make a
little difference everywhere he goes, strongly believing that “Education is the most powerful
weapon which you can use to change the world” (Nelson Mandela).