Today was Ivezic (UW) day. He gave some great lectures on useful methods from his new textbook. He was very nice on the subject of Extreme Deconvolution, which is the method Bovy, Roweis, and I developed a few years ago. He showed that it rocks on the SDSS stars. Late in the day, I met with Ivezic, Juric, and Vanderplas to discuss our ideas for Gaia "Zero-Day Exploits". We have to be ready! One great idea is to use the existing data we have (for example, PanSTARRS and SDSS), and the existing dynamical models we have of the Milky Way, to make specific predictions for every star in the Gaia catalog. Some of these predictions might be quite specific. I vowed to write one of my short data-analysis documents on this.
In the hack session, Foreman-Mackey generalized our K2 PSF model to give it more freedom, and then we wrote down our hyper-parameters, a hacky objective, and started experimental coding to find the best place to be working. By the wrap-up, he had found some pretty good settings.
The wrap-up session on Friday was deeply impressive and humbling! For more information, check out the HackPad (tm) index.
[ps. Next year this meeting will be called AstroHackWeek and it may happen in NYC. Watch this space.]
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