Talks and workshops

Recordings and/or slides and resource links to various talks that I've done. These talks focus on my research, outreach, programming languages, and more:

• 2024-12-17: A look on the bright side of black holes

  I was invited to give a talk at the Astro Obs Journal Club at Newcastle University. My talk was a brief overview of relativistic ray-tracing methods, and how we use them to calculate various spectral models. In particular, I focus on highlighting the difference geometric thickness in the accretion disc can make when using the lamppost coronal model, and, as I have in previous talks, demonstrated our method for decomposing extended corona to make them computationally tractable. I walk through the steps to reproduce the famous Jean-Pierre Luminet 1978 photograph of a spherical black hole with thin accretion disc, and discuss various results we have computed with Gradus.jl.

  Slides can be found here

• 2024-09-04: Moving out from under the lamp post: extended corona modelling

  Presented at the 2024 New Results in X-ray astronomy conference in Sussex. This talk was similar to the talk I gave at Sesto, but with more of a pedagogical explanation of our modelling efforts, a greater focus on reflection spectra instead of reverberation lags, and contextualizing our approaches within the literature of extended corona modelling.

  Slides can be found here

• 2024-09-03: Spacetime agnostic ray-tracing

  A talk I gave in the Event Horizon Telescope Gravitational Physics Working Group to highlight some of the use cases of Gradus.jl that may be relevant for the collaboration. The focus in this talk was on introducing, from a technical perspective, our approach to general relativistic ray-tracing, our use cases and how these motivates the design of Gradus.jl, and potential applications for the working group.

  Slides can be found here

• 2024-07-10: Spectral variability modelling

  A talk about the theory and practice of extended corona modelling around black holes, with a focus on reverberation lags. This talk was for the From the Dolomites to the event horizon: sledging down the potential well conference in Sexten/Sesto 2024.

  Slides can be found here.

• 2024-05-02: Optimal approaches with Zig

  I was invited to give a talk in the Cambridge RSE Seminar series, so decided to talk about one of my favourite programming languages, and what I learned learning Zig.

  Slides can be found here.

• 2024-04-26: An informal introduction to Julia

  This was a talk I did for the Astrophysics Group Bristol's Developer Group, as a way of introducing the Julia programming language and some of its features relevant for astrophysical modelling.

  Slides can be found here

• 2024-04-12: Developing a Python package.

  This was a talk I did for the Astrophysics Group Bristol's Developer Group. Several members of our group were in the process of packaging their research codes, so we discussed as a group to do an overview of what goes in to making a Python package, how can we make sharing code as effortless as possible, and importantly, entirely reproducible.

  Slides can be found here.

• 2024-03-27: Our mutual friend, Tracy

  Presented in the Cambridge RSE Profiling Workshop, organized by a friend and colleague Tom Meltzer. The workshop consisted of a number of talks related to profiling tools for single-threaded executables to full High Performance Computing codes, including methodologies and techniques. My contribution was a talk about the Tracy profiler; initially intended for profiling video games, Tracy has become a feature rich, nano-second accurate, real-time profiling tool with a client-server architecture that lends itself well to remote telemetry. My talk was a brief, hands-on introduction to Tracy and its features.

• 2024-03-22: Stars and planets mini-lecture

  Along with a colleague in my department, we delivered a short guest lecture for the University of Bristol's 1st year physics course Stars and Planets. My colleague spoke about metalicity in AGN and his work as part of the Euclid collaboration in predicting expected AGN detection populations. I covered some of the theoretical approached in modelling black hole reflection spectra, how we can use reflection spectra to measure properties of the spacetime, and even test gravity theories.

• 2024-02-02: An introduction to debugging (in Python)

  This was a short hands-on introduction to debugging that I ran in the Astrophysics Group Bristol's Developer Group. It covered an overview of debugging strategies for the different types of bugs one commonly encounters, including an example to try debugging in a Compton scattering simulation script.

• 2023-12-15: Hands on git

  This was a short hands-on introduction to git that I ran in the Astrophysics Group Bristol's Developer Group. Since our group already had at least basic familiarity with some git concepts, I structured this around jumping into the deep end and tackling what is otherwise one of the scariest things to encounter when starting in git: merge conflicts.

• 2023-06-21: Gradus.jl lighting talk

  As part of the VAST graduate talk series, I presented a 5-minute lightning talk about Gradus.jl, the general relativistic ray-tracing software I am developing as part of my research. The talk covered a quick example of how we can build complex models in Gradus.jl, and how the flexibility in design means we can dramatically modify our models with single-line changes in the source code.

  Slides can be found here.