IAP HELPS ORGANIZE THE ARIEL DATA CHALLENGE 2025
Following the success of the 2024 Data Challenge, the IAP's Ariel team has been asked once again to prepare the Ariel Data Challenge 2025, an open international competition on a data reduction problem using artificial intelligence methods, in partnership with Kaggle (a global data science platform). ESA's Ariel mission (scheduled for launch in 2030) will study exoplanets using transit spectroscopy around bright stars. Deep learning methods are being studied at IAP within the Ariel framework, with support from CNES.
IAP's main involvement has been provided by Angèle Syty (IAP PhD student since October 2024 under the supervision of JP Beaulieu and P Drossart), in close collaboration with the Ariel team at University College London. In 2024, the competition attracted 1,414 participants, and resulted in a collective presentation at the NEURIPS world conference (Vancouver, December 2024). This year, the data challenge tackles the issue of correcting the instrumental effects expected from Ariel's infrared spectrometers, and the measurement of exoplanetary atmospheric signatures. All these effects have been simulated using the virtual instrument model, to predict realistic observations of Ariel targets.
This year's data challenge tackles the issue of correcting the instrumental effects expected from Ariel's infrared spectrometers, and the measurement of exoplanetary atmospheric signatures. All these effects have been simulated using the virtual instrument model, to predict realistic observations of Ariel targets.
The data challenge tackles one of the most difficult astrophysical problems: extracting the extremely faint planetary signal from an array of instrumental and astrophysical noise that drowns out the desired signal. The development of robust and reliable data extraction methods is a key issue for all current space missions.
The project was coordinated by University College London (Gordon Yip), in collaboration with Cardiff University, CNES, Sapienza di Roma University, the Astrophysics Institute of Andalusia (IAA-CSIC) and IAP.
This initiative has received the support of Kaggle's Competitions Research program, which involves the community of researchers and specialists in artificial intelligence, well beyond astrophysics. The competition will take place between June 26, 2025 and end of October and results will be announced at the 2025 NEURIPS conference late 2025.
Contacts
- Angèle Syty (IAP PhD student since October 2024 under the supervision of J. P. Beaulieu and P. Drossart at IAP and Orphée Faucoz at CNES)
Institut d'astrophysique de Paris, CNRS, Sorbonne Université
Angele [dot] Syty [at] iap [dot] fr
Links
Main ADC website (lead: Dr. Kai Hou (Gordon) Yip, UCL): UCL/ADC2025
Layout: Jean Mouette
June 2025