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September 2016 Meet

Saturday 17th September, 1pm to 6pm at Broad Oak Sports and Social Club

Open Source Science

Matthew Withers

Matt is a first year PhD student at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation which is part of the University of Portsmouth. His research is funded through the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and focuses on probes of Dark Energy using mainly data from the new Extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS) which is part of the fourth iteration of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and the Dark Energy Survey (DES). He was awarded his Open BSc (Hons) degree from the Open University after gaining a Certificate of Higher Education from the University of Durham in Astronomy and Physics.

He is interested primarily in Cosmology and Astrophysics - large scale structure, dark energy, dark matter, inflation, galaxy evolution, theories of cosmology... He is especially interested in the combination of theoretical models and observational data that work to constrain each other.

Away from Physics, Matt is a keen amateur astronomer/astrophotographer and Linux enthusiast. He is very passionate about Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and contributes to open source software where he can. Other interests include walking, reading and photography.


Open Source Science

Science has changed a lot in the last couple of decades, not only in terms of the use of computing technology, but also in the size of collaborations and experiments. Matt will present a short overview of how the Open Philosophy has fared in this discipline and highlight some key projects where it has enabled massive advancements in our understanding.

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