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Abstract:
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Today's measurement devices have literally opened up entire new worlds for us to explore. Recent satellite measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) are able to not only detect, but map out with increasing precision, details of the universe in its infancy. Many other astrophysical processes of interest after "last scattering" are also being probed from a variety of space or ground based platforms. Each of these instruments return observations with their own unique insight into the universe we want to understand, as well as their own peculiar response to the signal they are deigned to detect. As a result, we are faced with the increasingly important challenge of analyzing and interpreting observations from a wide variety of instruments to form a coherent view of the universe. How can we make inferences about our universe from observations returned from a diverse collection of instruments spanning a wide range of frequencies and spatial scales? I will discuss a general, Bayesian, approach to these problems with applications to the analysis of the Cosmic Microwave Background. Open challenges for cosmological data analysis of future experiments will also be discussed.
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