Physical sciences span problems and challenges at all scales in the universe: from finding exoplanets and asteroids in trillions of sky-survey pixels, to automatic tracking of extreme weather phenomena in climate datasets, to detecting anomalies in event streams from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Tackling a number of associated data-intensive tasks, including, but not limited to, regression, classification, clustering, dimensionality reduction, likelihood-free inference, generative models, and experimental design are critical for furthering scientific discovery. The Deep Learning for Physical Sciences (DLPS) workshop invites researchers to contribute papers that demonstrate progress in the application of machine and deep learning techniques to real-world problems in physical sciences (including the fields and subfields of astronomy, chemistry, Earth science, and physics).

We will discuss research questions, practical implementation challenges, performance / scaling, and unique aspects of processing and analyzing scientific datasets. The target audience comprises members of the machine learning community who are interested in scientific applications and researchers in the physical sciences. By bringing together these two communities, we expect to strengthen dialogue, introduce exciting new open problems to the wider NIPS community, and stimulate production of new approaches to solving science problems. Invited talks from leading individuals from both communities will cover the state-of-the-art techniques and set the stage for this workshop.