Facundo Sapienza
Affiliations. Department of Statistics, UC Berkeley.
485 Evans Hall
University of California, Berkeley
CA 94703, USA
I am an Argentinian PhD candidate with a background in mathematics, physics, and data science. My research lies in the intersection of novel data science methods and physics, with emphasis in glacier modelling and scientific software development. I am fortunate to be advised by Fernando Pérez (UC Berkeley, Project Jupyter) and Jonathan Taylor (Stanford).
Large part of my work is motivated by the use of differential equations as regression mechanisms to model complex geophysical systems. By leveraging in modern differential programming tools, it is possible to train machine learning models where the modelled response is given by the numerical solutions of physical constrained differential equations. This allows to combine both data and physics-driven approaches. I focus in the applications of this tools for mountain glacier modelling, where I work in funcional inversion problems aiming to discover empirical laws governing the flow of ice. With the advent of rich datasets with larger spatial and temporal coverage, it is becoming possible to model glaciers at global scale.
I also work in data-driven approaches for the modelling of apparent polar wander paths, where the objective in to learn about the past motion of plate tectonics by relying in paleomagnetic data. This involves learning patterns from scarse and noise data supported in the sphere.
I am enthusiastic about open science and reproducibility research, and the ways that data science can help to democratize science. It is my belief that physics and earth science will benefit from the incorporation of data driven-approaces.
keyworkds: physics-informed ML, differential programming, glaciology, paleomagnetism, scientific computing, open-source.
News
Nov 3, 2023 | Sapienza et. al (2023) highlighted in Eos |
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Oct 15, 2023 | Check on the article about my reseach in the news La Nacion in Argentina (in Spanish) |
Oct 9, 2023 | I just created this website |
Oct 1, 2023 | I attendend the 10th Heidelberg Laureate Forum where I was able to interact with great professors and students! |
Jun 7, 2023 | New preprint available! Universal Differential Equations for glacier ice flow modelling |