Arancibia indicates that these opportunities (see table) are linked to existing needs in other industries such as banks, mining, or those companies that need to enhance their marketing areas. All, as in astronomy, must process large volumes of information that must be analyzed and visualized.
The above is also shared by Doctor Mauricio Araya. He says that astronomers estimate that the observable universe has more than 100 billion galaxies, so increasingly sophisticated intelligent systems will be needed to deal with the processing of all that information. This ability may well be useful in other areas such as those already mentioned. As an anecdote, Araya says that many high-level professionals, after going through astronomical centers of great relevance, come to work for famous companies such as Spotify, Amazon, among others.
Data management for the economy of the future.
Since 2017, the Ministry of the Economy, through its “Economy of the Future” area and with the preliminary support of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), ALMA and Amazon Web Services, has promoted the creation of the Data Observatory or Data Observatory Foundation, that in the words of the ministers Andrés Couve and José Ramón Valente will have as mission “to receive, process and store the data sets generated in the country, and that, due to their volume, nature and complexity, require curation, exploration, visualization and analysis that facilitates its availability for the development of knowledge, technology and innovation, and its applications for the economy and society ”. [read column]
This opportunity for Arancibia will help advance towards a new stage that allows undertaking specific projects and initiatives: training of talents, generation of technologies, solving problems.
“A company in collaboration with this initiative and that effectively generates solutions, that addresses the problems of astronomy, has an asset that allows it to sit at the table to carry out projects on a global scale. For example, a company that currently works with the Latam company in its marketing area in Chile could collaborate with the Data Observatory to scale its solutions and be able to work with American Airline, Emirates; in other words, working with an airline that has a greater number of customers ”, he concludes.
The foregoing also impacts the job opportunities of professionals who have specialized in the field of data. Today, many of them work in academia, observatories or public initiatives, but local technology companies are emerging increasingly that are awakening the interest of various industries to solve problems using the most advanced in information technology, and with the support of talents capable of meeting those needs.
Cristián Irribarra is an astronomer from the Universidad Católica de Chile and currently works as a data scientist at Forcast, a company specialized in generating solutions based on data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, among other technologies.
Cristián’s mission within Forcast is to receive any type of numerical data from companies and from there create a statistical model with computational tools that allow interpreting the behavior of these numbers to infer their future and what things can be obtained.
“If you are given the sales history of a store, in principle you could know how much you sell daily, the amount of profit you will have at the end of the month; However, if you intrude deeper into the data and use special systems you can optimize the product offer, know what prices to raise or lower, how people respond to price changes, how much the consumption of an object will change you in specific in the future, ”says Cristián.
To carry out this work, the expert points out that a database is essential, “that is almost an axiom of the data scientist and artificial intelligence. The more data you have about something, the better the model you use will perform; in addition, you will assign it greater versatility ”.
“Very recently we were making a prototype to detect anomalies in street light poles with cameras; that is, if they are crooked, damaged or otherwise. One of the things that most caught my attention is that we used a system that was pre-made but to interpret other images. He did not know what a post was, but with no more than a thousand images of posts taken with my cell phone, in about 30 minutes the system was able to recognize them ”.
Cristián indicates that this example demonstrates the scope of a correct interpretation of data since systems are becoming more and more powerful, “the story is knowing how to take advantage of it and use it for various industries. If we think only in detection models, there are countless possible applications that we have not yet tested. “
However, in some cases companies have effective information gathering systems, which makes the task easier and faster; in other cases, there are problems in recording the data. For the latter, Cristian indicates that it is Forcast’s task to know how to deal with those gaps and inconsistencies on the part of customers.
“Many times the registry is filled out by hand, or they started doing it recently and they don’t have a correct structure, but regardless of that we use it the same. Whether it’s dirty or not, we get to the final product, this is an essential part of what Forcast does ”, he concludes.
The great contribution of astronomy to solving problems shows us the enormous potential of this area of knowledge in the country. Chile will concentrate 70% of astronomical observations by 2024, so a strategy and the support of various productive sectors are required to take advantage of it.
