Since 2013 Alvaro was funded by ASTeC to undertake a PhD in Jon Marangos's group at Imperial College London, developing techniques to measure ultrafast processes using few-femtosecond pulses from X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs). During this time he carried out experiments at the LCLS and SACLA facilities utilising novel XFEL operating modes. He regularly reported his insights back to ASTeC, further informing future light source designs. As one of his latest results, Alvaro introduced a method to make accurate predictions of XFEL pulse properties using machine learning [Sanchez-Gonzalez et al., Nature Communications, 8 (2017) 15461]. Alvaro has now taken up a position working on artificial intelligence research at Google DeepMind. He will be visiting Daresbury in January 2018 to present a talk on 'Machine Learning Applied to Single-Shot X-ray Diagnostics in an XFEL' as part of the workshop on Intelligent Controls for Particle Accelerators.
Article by Dave Dunning
