Institute for Advanced Study / Princeton University Joint Astrophysics Colloquium

I will weave three separate threads. The first will be to describe recent and ongoing results from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Survey. I will present the BAO results from the early DESI data, and some of the preparatory work for the Year 1 data. I will then present a new approach to reconstruction based on optimal transport, highlighting some recent results and ideas for future applications. I will end by discussing merging perturbative reconstruction ideas with convolutional neural networks, and a possible new application to primordial non-gaussianity.