Note: Gautham Narayan is the SkAI Deputy Director for Research (Astro)
Original URL: https://astro.illinois.edu/news/2025-06-24/unlocking-cosmos-ai
By Jake Keister (UIUC Dept. of Astronomy, June 24, 2025)
It began with a problem of scale.
Modern telescopes like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, set to begin operations in October 2025, are poised to revolutionize astronomy by capturing unprecedented volumes of data—millions of time-variable astrophysical events across the sky each night. But with this scale comes a new challenge: How do you process, classify, and interpret this firehose of information when human analysis alone can’t keep up with the hundreds of new events being reported by Rubin every second?
That’s the frontier being navigated by Gautham Narayan, professor of astronomy at the University of Illinois and deputy director for astrophysics research at the NSF-Simons AI Institute for the Sky (SkAI). His group has spent over a decade pioneering artificial intelligence in astrophysics, developing early classification and inference algorithms, and helping lay the groundwork for a supercharged field by SkAI. “My group has been doing AI and astrophysics for about the last decade,” Narayan explains. “SkAI is a way to take the things I’ve been doing locally here at Illinois, and really make it a much larger effort that is multi-institute.” To read more, see https://astro.illinois.edu/news/2025-06-24/unlocking-cosmos-ai
The SkAI Institute is one of the National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and Simons Foundation.
Information on National AI Institutes is available at aiinstitutes.org.
