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18-03-2021
Colloquium: Astronomical discovery in the era of Big Data
| Submitter: | Pikky Atri |
| Description: | Emille Ishida The next generation of astronomical surveys will completely change the discovery process in astronomy. Faced with millions of possible new sources per night, serendipitous discoveries will not occur. At the same time, given the significant improvement in detection efficiency it is also reasonable to expect that unforeseen astrophysical sources will be detected. However, if we do not have tools to identify them we may lose the opportunity without realizing it. In this talk I will go through a little of the history and structures of the discovery process in astronomy, focusing on the role still to be played by the human expert in the era of artificial intelligence. As a case study, I will present the experiences reported by the SNAD team, an international collaboration conceived to prepare machines, and humans, for the arrival of data from large scale astronomical surveys. I will describe a few traditional and adaptive anomaly detection techniques to identify unusual objects in simulations, catalog data and the data stream from the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF). Finally I will describe the efforts currently in place to prepare these tools to deal with the alert stream coming from the Vera Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time LSST). |
| Copyright: | Image submitted by speaker as part of their work. |
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