
“It is exciting to see ideas from AI and reinforcement learning brought to telescope scheduling, where every decision must balance changing conditions and scarce observing time…Developing intelligent scheduling systems for astronomical surveys also raises fascinating new machine learning problems, and we are excited to continue exploring them through this project.”
-Statement by Northwestern University’s Aravindan Vijayaraghavan, who co-led the AI telescope project with Drlica-Wagner, as quoted by NOIRLab. The AI program planned and managed observations on a national facility for the first time. It is hoped that the involvement of AI could add efficiencies to the process, thereby allowing astronomers to have more time for their science.