Online: | |
Visits: | |
Stories: |
With the permission of Eric Feigelson, I am reproducing here this very useful post from the Astrostatistics and Astroinformatics Portal (ASAIP) blog on the many conferences on the discipline of Astrostatistics, and the growing number of powerful statistical software tools available to astronomers.
CONFERENCES
ASAIP readers may not realize the incredibly rich collection of scholarly conference, workshops and tutorials relating to astrostatisics and astroinformatics that are continuously being organized around the world. We try to keep the listing at http://asaip.psu.edu/meetings up to date, but any ASAIP member can add an entry. Let’s start with the meetings by the organizations affiliated with the ASAIP Web site:
There are many other meetings around the world. There is a 1-day meeting with world-class speakers on statistical cosmology in London coming up in mid-December, a week-long `Cosmology on Safari’ meeting in South Africa in January, and presentations on statistical approaches Local Group galaxies in Ann Arbor MI in June. Big Data in astronomy is discussed by top methodologists at the National Optical Astronomical Observatory in Tucson AZ in March, and another meeting focuses on time domain issues in Santa Barbara CA in May.
And of course, there are many large well-established conferences on methodology in the next few months: IEEE conference on data mining in Shenzhen CN, ASE conference on Big Data in Cambridge MA, a SIAM conference on computational science, an AIENG conference on scientific computing, a SIAM conference on Data Mining in Vancouver CA, and so forth. The University of Toronto is hosting a unique 5-month program on Big Data. Links to all of these events are given on the ASAIP meetings page.
***********************************
PUBLIC ARENA
We have added a new folder to the Resources section of ASAIP: Astrostatistics and astroinformatics in the public eye. A special section of the December issue Significance Magazine, read by tens of thousands of statisticians worldwide, has 11 articles on astronomy and astrostatistics. The cover of the magazine portrays large meteor fragments impacting a large city and the accompanying article discusses the probability of this happening … in real life, not Hollywood movies! An article about the rise of astrostatistics, spanning `planet hunting to sky surveys’, appeared last month in Yahoo News, one of the most widely read Web sites on the Internet. A New York Times article several weeks ago interviewed a statistician, an astronomer and a psychologists on the value of Bayesian approaches to real-life problems. The Zooniverse citizen science project, mostly astronomy but now broadening to other fields, has involved >1 million people around the world. And most impressively, nearly a million people have watched astronomer Andy Connolly present a gripping TED talk on the revolution expected by the LSST telescope, which will produce an enormous movie of the variable sky.
Altogether, while we might view our interests as narrow scientific subfield, the public appears very receptive to the synergies underway between statistics, computation and astronomy.
**********************************
SOFTWARE
With conferences, research and the public arena, there is no question that astrostatisticians and astroinformaticians are fluent with words and ideas. And individual researchers publish excellent scientific articles with sophisticated methods. But the commerce of advanced methodology from specialists to the wider research community has historically not been strong. We are pleased to say that practical methodological software is now emerging in several ways:
We have had a close look at a small group of methodologically talented astronomers who are now developing software tools for the wider community. The COsmostatistics INitiative (COIN) within the International Astrostatistics Association (IAA) was formed in June 2014 at the IAU Symposium on statistical cosmology. COIN has since been very active under the leadership of Rafael de Souza of Eötvös Loránd University (Univ of Budapest). Two papers under the title The overlooked potential of generalized linear models in astronomy’ have been submitted for publication with associated R/CRAN and Python packages. Other projects on likelihood-free inference of cosmological parameters, Gaussian mixture models, unsupervised learning, and other topics are underway.
Even more recently, a new IAA group was formed to develop a software product called DEep DAta Look (DeDaLo). Under the leadership of Italian astronomers Roberto Casalegno, Claudia Travaglio, and Maurizio Busso, DeDaLo will be an interactive 3D environment to enhance the way scientific Big Data are displayed and therefore analyzed. It will be based on Blender, a professional 3D Open Source software product for animations and video games, using the Blender Game Engine (BGE) that provides a powerful high-level programming tool for interactive 3D user experience. DeDaLo will embed Python3 scientific tools in Blender to give powerful analysis tools in a video gaming 3D visualization environment.