Annalena Kofler

Roosevelt would be proud and so am I. We will continue our fight.

I know that "the credit belongs to you, the women who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if she fails, at least fails while daring greatly."

For my female ML colleagues: One is fighting for her visa which would finally allow her to start her professorship, another is fighting to be taken seriously after switching fields, and another is fighting for the attention of her supervisor which he tends to give to his male PhD students.

For my fellow female physics PhD students: One is fighting for funding as an international student in the US, another is fighting against barriers put in her way by her supervisor after having a child, and the third is fighting for every minute of research time eaten away by LongCOVID.

Today is international Frauenkampftag ("women-fight-day") how we call it in German to highlight that women have been fighting for equal rights since the 1910s. More than 100 years later, women still have to fight for opportunities and this post is for all of you:

It was so much fun! Thanks for organizing and having me 🤩

Haha, how would you extend it to chemists? Like this?

I'd love to hear such a talk (and get my hands on your list :D). Do you know of any movies including gravitational waves?

Meme with the caprion: You were off by 3 centimeters. The biologist is represented by a white cat in the dark looking into the camera, the physicist looks like serious looking man with an emotionless expression, staring at the camera. The civil engineer is a relaxed dude with reflecting sun glasses, casually smiling saying "I mean it's alright" and finally, the astronomer is shown as a confident man with a beard looking with a smile into the distance, definitely not bothered.

#academicsky #physics #meme

The boys’ club: How Epstein’s influence shaped the exclusion of women in STEM In one email, an AI researcher suggested it’s “hard to be brilliant if you are worrying if you look fat or why another woman hates you.”

There were so many of us, exactly when these emails were being written, expressly working to undo the harms of sexual harassment and sexual discrimination in science. And so many people refused to believe us that any of it was real. It was all real.

19thnews.org/2026/02/epst...

Chart of Physics doctorates earned from 1978 to 2024, with a steady increase in the number of women but overarching trends closely tracking the number of men earning PhDs

Chart showing doctorates earned in astronomy from 1978 to 2024 with women making steady gains and closing in on parity, and an overarching increase in number of PhDs earned linked to the increasing numbers of women entering the field.

The AIP stats team has released its latest data of physics & astronomy PhD trends, with breakdown by gender. What is extraordinary to me is how clearly the overall trends exhibit an important gender dimension, and that that story is quite different between physics and astronomy.

Gladys Mae West obituary: mathematician who pioneered GPS technology She made key contributions to US cold-war science despite facing huge barriers as a Black woman.

No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition.

Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

"Put a single woman in a group of men and she will feel awkward. Put a single man in a group of women and he will feel in charge."
@athenedonald.bsky.social
occamstypewriter.org/athenedonald...

NASA will contribute 80.5 mio. USD to the space-based gravitational wave detector LISA! 🥳

Tübingen AI Research Building, where the Cluster of Excellence "Machine Learning" is based.

📢We’re hiring: W3-Professorship in Machine Learning in Physics @unituebingen.bsky.social! What we’re looking for: Established research profile in a core area of #physics (condensedmatter, quantum or theoretical particle physics), strong track record in research questions related to #ML and/or #AI.

"Women’s contributions to science are systematically undervalued until an external stamp of approval counteracts the negative effect of gender stereotypes on how their work is perceived."
Perfectly summarizes why we need more awards for women
#WomeninPhysics

Screenshot of the top of the paper "The undervaluing of elite women in physics", Abstract: "Elite women in physics wait longer than men for recognition. Once elected to the US National Academy of Sciences, however, their prominence surges — evidence that their work was undervalued all along." Body: "Physics has changed dramatically over the past 50 years, both in the range of phenomena it studies and its demographic composition. For example, the share of publishing women physicists worldwide has more than doubled — from 4.5% in 1970 to 9.2% in 2020 — and continues to increase. Yet parity remains distant, raising the question: to what degree has the physics community progressed toward the meritocratic ideal of recognizing scientists purely on the basis of their contributions? We address this question in two ways. First, we compare broad trends in the productivity and prominence of men and women physi- cists worldwide over the past 50 years. Second, we examine the careers of elite physicists, asking whether the high honour of being elected to the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) impacts the careers of men and women in physics differently. Our analysis leverages a recently developed Bayesian network model1 to estimate individual measures of scientific productivity and prominence from large-scale bibliographic data. We apply this model to a global physics collaboration network constructed from first- and last-author pairs in 9.1 million physics journal articles (omitting single-author papers) published between 1950 and 2023 and recorded in the OpenAlex bibliographic database. Within this global network, we focus on 93,456 established physicists with at least 30 years between their first and most recent publication and with at least 10 first- or last-author publications..."

Out now in @natphys.nature.com "The undervaluing of elite women in physics", with @weihuali.bsky.social and H Zheng, we show how election into prestigious academic societies has markedly different effects on the research prominence of women and men physicists /1
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#meme

Meme showing a seagull with seaweed on their head such that it can't see anything. The bird is labelled "Most professors" and the seaweed "Emails".

The comedy wildlife photo awards 2025 have been published and I couldn't resist
#meme #science #academicsky

New paper led by @annalenakofler.bsky.social: Extending our gravitational wave SBI code Dingo using transformers, making it adaptable to realistic data conditions and boosting performance.

Congrats Annalena – a lot of hard work went into this and it produced excellent results! Great poster too!

Thanks to the Autonomous Vision Group led by
@andreasgeiger.bsky.social for #ScholarInbox!

Screenshot of scholar inbox email showing the paper Flexible Gravitational-Wave Parameter Estimation with Transformers. The email is addressed to Annalena and the first author of the paper with highest relevance is named Annalena Kofler

When #scholarinbox accurately predicts that you might be interested in your own paper 😍
#AIinTuebingen

Often we talk about accuracy and speed of inference during ML applications to science. However, an equally important feature is flexibility. This is because real data requires flexibility (changing settings during inference time). Please check out Annalena’s thread for more info!

11/ 🙏 Huge thanks to my collaborators: @maximiliandax.bsky.social @stephenrgreen.bsky.social Jonas Wildberger, @nihar-gupte.bsky.social Jonathan Gair, Alessandra Buonanno, Bernhard Schölkopf

10/ 💻 Try DINGO-T1 yourself in our Google Colab tutorial: github.com/dingo-gw/din...

Flexible Gravitational-Wave Parameter Estimation with Transformers Gravitational-wave data analysis relies on accurate and efficient methods to extract physical information from noisy detector signals, yet the increasing rate and complexity of observations represent ...

9/ 📄 Full details and results are in our preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2512.02968

8/ 📉 Without DINGO-T1, all these analyses would have required training 94 separate DINGO models. Instead, we train once—and adapt across settings.

Corner plot showing the deviations in the final mass and final spin for seven gravitational wave events separately analyzed with the inspiral and post-insprial part of the signal. All distributions peak at (0,0), meaning they are consistent with general relativity, but some events have interesting shapes.

7/ 🌀 By varying frequency ranges, DINGO-T1 enables general relativity (GR) consistency tests: We analyze inspiral and post-inspiral separately and check if final mass/spin estimates agree. Deviations consistent with GR peak near (0,0).

Corner plot showing the chirp mass, theta_jn, the luminosity distance and the arrival time of the same event for different detector configurations (H, HL, HLV). The skymap shows that the sky position can be better constrained the more detectors are included in the analysis.

6/ 🔁 DINGO-T1 lets us easily re-analyze the same event using different detector configurations, enabling systematic studies of detector impact on parameter estimates.

Results for the sampling efficiency of real events shown as violin plots for DINGO-T1 and the DINGO Baseline. The DINGO-T1 model achieves a median efficiency of 4.2% while the Baseline obtains 1.4%. The individual samples are shown as dots for 3-detector events and circles for 2-detector events. The baseline cannot analyze 2-detector events, because it is not flexible.

5/ 🌐 With this flexibility, a single DINGO-T1 model can analyze all 48 O3 events with good importance sampling efficiency—even when detectors and frequency ranges differ across settings. No retraining required.