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Welcome
Joshua Bloom is co-founder and CEO of Valency, a venture-backed company building infrastructure for agentic science. He is also an astronomy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught radiative processes, high-energy astrophysics, astronomy data lab, and a graduate-level “Python for Data Science” course, and served as chair of the Astronomy Department. He has published over 350 refereed articles on time-domain transients events, AI, and telescope/insight automation. He co-founded the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) and is a faculty member of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab. Josh has been awarded the Data-Driven Discovery prize from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Pierce Prize from the American Astronomical Society, the Sloan Fellowship, a Junior Fellowship at the Harvard Society, and the Hertz Foundation Fellowship. He holds a PhD from Caltech and degrees from Harvard College and Cambridge University. Before Valency, he was co-founder and CTO of Wise.io, an AI application startup, acquired by GE Digital in 2016. His book on gamma-ray bursts, a technical introduction for physical scientists, was published by Princeton University Press.
Much of Josh's current group activities can be found at ML4Science.
Josh is the founder and principal curator of the CuratingAI art exhibition which ran in April 2024.
Note on Speaking Invitations: In the interest of fostering diverse representation, before inviting me to speak at a conference or the like, I ask that organizers pay particular attention to attracting women and those from underrepresented groups to be on the panel(s)/speaker list. I've served on too many academic and industry panels where the representation of such groups was nil or close to zero. If logistics work out, I'd be happy to participate so long as there are some assurances that it will be a diverse group on stage.
AI-generated podcast about a recent paper An Earth-mass planet and a brown dwarf in orbit around a white dwarf:
Interests
- Machine learning meets Physics
- Time domain (Black hole transients, Gamma-ray bursts)
- Optical/infrared instrumentation
Education
PhD in Astrophysics, 2002
Caltech
MPhil in Astronomy, 1997
Cambridge University
AB in Astrophysics and Astronomy and Physics, 1996
Harvard College
