Nick Ball - Research

I am currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, working on data mining, machine learning, object classification, photometric redshifts, and the environments of galaxies and quasars, mostly in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The appointment is from November 2004 until October 2009, and from 2004-7 was joint with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Prior to that I was a Masters and then PhD student at the University of Sussex in the UK, working on Galaxy Types, Luminosity Functions and Environment in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, under the supervision of Jon Loveday. Before that I did Natural Sciences at Cambridge University (UK) and before that I grew up in Sheffield (again UK).

Research Projects

See also the list of publications.
Illinois (2004-2009)
The evolution of galaxy properties and environment in the SDSS using photometric redshifts
Robust Machine Classification of Large Astronomical Surveys III: Probabilistic Photometric Redshifts for Galaxies and Quasars in the SDSS and GALEX
Robust Machine Classification of Large Astronomical Surveys II: Photometric Redshifts for Quasars in the SDSS DR5
Robust Machine Classification of Large Astronomical Surveys I: Star-Galaxy Separation in the SDSS DR3
Sussex (2001-2004)
Galaxy Morphology, Colour and Environment in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
Bivariate Galaxy Luminosity Functions in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
Galaxy Types in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Using Supervised Artificial Neural Networks

Other Pages

The above pages are at a technical level. For the Sussex PhD research I also made a nontechnical page giving an overview of the areas I worked on.
Finally, there are some astronomy links and acknowledgements to collaborators, funding, the webpage background image, etc.


Last modified: Mar 27th 2008

Home