With nearly 100 detections of binary black hole mergers, gravitational-wave (GW) astronomy is now a data-rich field. Extracting information from noisy GW signals requires accurate waveform models that describe the radiation emitted during these mergers. The most accurate waveforms are generated through numerical relativity (NR), which involves solving Einstein's equations via large-scale simulations. While NR provides high-fidelity data, each simulation is computationally expensive — often requiring weeks to months of supercomputing time — making it impractical for real-time detection or Bayesian source characterization.
In this talk, I will present how techniques from nonlinear reduced order modeling — including the Discrete Empirical Interpolation Method — combined with physics-informed signal decomposition, enable fast, accurate surrogate models that compress high-dimensional NR waveforms into representations evaluable in milliseconds. I will describe the construction pipeline, key numerical techniques, and the integration of these surrogates into GW data analysis. Finally, I will demonstrate how they are enabling precision astrophysical inference at scale.
Short Bio: Tousif Islam is a Kavli Postdoctoral Scholar at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics. His research focuses on high-performance computing, data science, and gravitational-wave astronomy, particularly in building nonlinear reduced order models and Bayesian inference frameworks. Tousif earned his PhD in Computational Sciences and MS in Data Science from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in 2023. During his PhD, he held several competitive research fellowships and visiting positions, including as a Kavli Graduate Fellow at KITP (UCSB), a predoctoral scholar at the NSF Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM, UCLA), a visiting researcher at the TAPIR group (Caltech), a semester visitor at the NSF Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM, Brown), and a GravNet fellow at the Niels Bohr Institute (University of Copenhagen). He holds a BS-MS in Physics from IISER Kolkata and was a Long-Term Student Fellow at ICTS-TIFR.
