The National Science Foundation has awarded a $600,000 grant to research assistant professor Berkay Aydin. The three-year grant will be used for the construction of cyberinfrastructure that can detect and analyze magnetic polarity inversion lines (PILs), providing a deeper understanding of extreme space weather events as well as enhancing predictive capabilities of space weather forecasters.
PILs are hotspots of the most extreme space weather events, affecting technologically complex systems such as telecommunication and navigation satellites and even commercial airline flights. This project involves creating a cyberinfrastructure to investigate PILs by first identifying and quantifying them before subsequently analyzing their shape and formation patterns. By studying the spatiotemporal patterns and important shape characteristics, it will be easier to identify and understand precursors to solar eruptions, thereby aiding in the prediction of these events.
Dr. Aydin’s grant was awarded by NSF’s Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure and jointly supported by the Solar Terrestrial Physics Program and the Division of Integrative and Collaborative Education and Research within the Directorate for Geosciences. Astronomy professor Petrus Martens is co-PI for the grant.
Dr. Aydin is a team member at Georgia State’s Data Mining Laboratory, which is jointly directed by Dr. Martens and computer science professor Rafal Angryk. The DM Lab is a multidisciplinary environment focused on research in data with highly dynamic spatial and temporal characteristics. Topics studied by the lab include (un)supervised classification/clustering, fuzzy (overlapping) multi-class data, and ensemble learning (fusion of classifiers).
Dr. Aydin earned his Ph.D. in computer science from Georgia State in 2017 under the direction of Dr. Angryk. He then worked as a postdoctoral associate for Dr. Angryk before becoming a research assistant professor in 2018.
Story by Ashlie Swanson