Bruce Bassett

Prof. Bruce Bassett, Senior Resident Researcher, is head of the Cosmology Group at AIMS South Africa. Bruce is a graduate of the University of Cape Town, where he obtained his MSc in Applied Mathematics. After completing a PhD in Trieste, and a postdoctoral fellowship in Oxford, he lectured at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at Portsmouth University. After a sabbatical at Kyoto University he returned to Cape Town to a joint position, Professor of Applied Mathematics at UCT and astronomer at the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO).

His research focuses on observational cosmology, inference and machine learning; particularly applied to large cosmological surveys. Through observations with the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) and his involvement in large international surveys such as the SDSS, Bruce has also worked extensively in optimisation, Bayesian statistics and Big Data. Bruce is one of the vice-presidents of the International Astrostatistics Association.

Research interests:

• Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, Bayesian inference, observational and theoretical cosmology

Companies

• Chief AI Scientist VoxCroft Analytics (2019)
• Founder and Director Africa Data Science Intensive Program (2018)
• Head of AIMS cosmology and machine learning group AIMS (2010)
• Professor UCT/AIMS/SAAO (2006)
• Professor of Applied Mathematics University of Cape Town (2006)
• Head of Data Science South African Radio Astronomical Observatory (SKA Africa) (2017 — 2020)
• Postdoctoral Researcher University of Oxford (1998 — 1999)