Probing the galaxy-mass connection in TeraByte-scale imaging surveys

The past decade has seen the emergence of new techniques and
exciting discoveries powered by wide-field imaging surveys from the UV
to the near-IR domain. Owing to gravitational lensing, galaxy
clustering and abundance matching (to name but a few), coupled with
advanced statistical interpretation, the informative power of
astronomical imaging surveys has significantly increased. In
particular, the connection between galaxies and dark matter, a
keystone in cosmology and the study of galaxy evolution, has widely
gained from this "scale revolution" and the future is bright, as the
next experiments such as LSST, Euclid or WFIRST are dedicated "survey"
machines that will further increase imaging data by orders of
magnitude (without mentioning the tremendous gain in image resolution,
time domain and deep near-IR imaging). I will focus my talk on
reviewing the main techniques to connect galaxies and dark matter in
the context of wide-field surveys and I will show some concrete
examples of applied data analysis, showing that these techniques are
now well proven, although the challenges in reducing some critical
systematic uncertainties are ahead of us.