Since August this year, Insper professor Luciano Silva moved to Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, United Stated. He has been working there at an ambitious initiative which plans to take the next three years to accelerate algorithms to detect exoplanets — planets that orbit remote stars that are not the Sun.

 

Silva works next to two professors of Illinois University’s Grainger College of Engineering (UIUC), Laxmikant Kale and Lawrence Rauchwerger. “They are from Computing Science field and have never used institution’s supercomputer to research in the exoplanet field”, says Silva, who is member of Brazilian Society of Computing (SBC), of Association for Computer Machinery (ACM), of Brazilian Society of Mathematics (SMB) and of Brazilian Astronomy Society (SAB).

 

Efficient detection

 

In other words, the Brazilian professor adds his knowledge in space research and begins to count on UIUC advanced computing resources. Two scientific initiation students Arthur Martins de Souza Barreto and Luiza Valezim Augusto Pinto, from Computing Science undergraduate, follow the works from distance. “They join meetings and are not intimidated; they already showed having conditions to follow debates at an equal-to-equal manner”, states Silva.

 

It is hard to detect exoplanets as they don’t generate light. That is the reason why few were known until few decades ago. Nowadays we know more than 5,100, and counting daily. However, computing can contribute even more to make identification more efficient and accurate. The proposal from these three researchers is to use STAPL programming libraries and Charm4py programming structure to replace the slower current methods.

 

“We want to solve problems that have periodic setting, generating data that allow to calculate, for example, the duration of one year at a certain exoplanet”, describes Luciano Silva, who reminds that the solution can contribute for the analysis of the data generated by the new James Webb telescope. “Other applications are on the radar, such as solar activity peaks and pulsars. All projects from the area that use periodograms can benefit from it”.

 

A pioneering partnership

 

The initiative is one of the five research projects developed between Insper and UIUC. The agreement signed with the Grainger College of Engineering strengthens Insper’s Computing Science area as well as Engineering courses, getting benefit from educational technology, professors’ preparation, development of applied research and interchanges.

 

This is the first time that the American university signs an alliance with a superior teaching institute from Latin America in the technology field. In the first year, five projects are under development in partnership with Insper and UIUC professors. They began in August this year and reunite 17 researchers.

 

Officially innaugurated in 1982, but with roots going back to 1859, UIUC has over 3,000 collaborators and almost 95,000 students. Among the institution’s 470,000 alumni, there are 24 Nobel Prize winners — and is the globe’s 24th institution who formed more Nobel winners.

 

From Insper’s side, it counts also with UIUC’s expertise on undergraduate and graduate course design that include Data Science and Computing Science to other knowledge areas such as Business, Economy, Phylosophy and Engineerings.