Rix and I spent part of the morning with Frank Bigiel (Heidelberg) talking about radio interferometry. In the upcoming ALMA world, people doing work on faint sources (deep fields) will want to get probabilistic information out of radio maps—information like confidence intervals on source brightness and existence. What they don't currently do in the radio world is write down a likelihood function for the scene; there is no probability of the read-out amplitudes and phases on baselines conditioned on the model for the scene on the sky. We discussed the possibility of creating that function; we spent (therefore) a lot of time talking about noise.
I'm aware of a little bit of work in this area. Some former Sydney colleagues are doing probabilistic reconstructions of star's brightness profiles, constrained by stellar interferometry data. Although I reckon it's easier to parameterise what a star might look like in the optical than it is to model what an arbitrary radio emitter might look like.
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