Finding and characterising AGN behind the Magellanic Clouds

The project aims to identify Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) among the many
millions of point sources detected in the direction of the Magellanic
Clouds system by a plethora of multiwavelength surveys, principally the
VISTA survey of the Magellanic Clouds (VMC), Surveying the Agents of
Galaxy Evolution (SAGE) and new radio surveys with the Australian SKA
Pathfinder and MeerKAT. This will use machine learning tools such as
Random Forest supervised learning based on spectroscopically confirmed
training sets, and confirm the nature of interesting sources with
spectroscopy including from Keele's time on the Southern African Large
Telescope (SALT). The main scientific question that is being addressed is
how universal AGN activity has evolved over cosmological time, and in
particular what "outliers" from general trends tell us about this process.