2012-09-11

AstroInformatics 2012, day two

I arrived at AstroInformatics 2012 today (day two) in the car of Zeljko Ivezic (UW). There were many great talks. Highlights for me included Jojic talking about de-noising images and video using image textures built from image patches. He had very impressive results with an exceedingly simple model (that patches of the image are all distorted views of some fiducial patch). Longo claimed that he can beat XDQSOz with a new data-driven model. I am looking forward to reading the details. Norris described the SKA Pathfinder project EMU, which is going to be awesome. 70 million galaxies, many of them just star forming, detected in the radio, over 75 percent of the sky. All data will be released within a day of taking. The analysis is going to be done with attention paid to faint source detection. The raw uv data will be thrown away after analysis, which scares the crap out of me but hey, that's the new world of huge projects!

In the breaks and on the drive, I discussed with Ivezic and Jacob VanderPlas (UW) their nascent book on astronomical data analysis. It is a comprehensive work, with many worked out examples. It will ship with the code making all figures released open-source. I gave some comments after skimming a few sections and I was so stoked that I volunteered to read a bit of it critically pre-publication. Nice work, people!

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