In our panic about upcoming Gaia DR2, Adrian Price-Whelan and I have established a weekly workshop on Wednesdays, in which we discuss, hack, and parallel-work on Gaia projects in the library at the Flatiron CCA. In our first meeting we just said what we wanted to do, jointly edited a big shared google doc, and then started working. At each workshop meeting, we will spend some time talking and some time working. My plan is to do data-driven photometric parallaxes, and maybe infer some dust.
At the Stars Group Meeting, Stephen Feeney (Flatiron) talked about asteroseismology, where we are trying to get the seismic parameters without ever taking a Fourier Transform. Some of the crowd (Cantiello in particular) suggested that we have started on stars that are too hard; we should choose super-easy, super-bright, super-standard stars to start. Others in the crowd (Hawkins in particular) pointed out that we could be using asteroseismic H-R diagram priors on our inference. Why not be physically motivated? Duh.
At the end of Group Meeting, Kevin Schawinski (ETH) said a few words about auto-encoders. We discussed imposing more causal structure on them, and seeing what happens. He is going down this path. We also veered off into networks-of-autonomous-robots territory for LSST follow-up, keying off remarks from Or Graur (CfA) about time-domain and spectroscopic surveys. Building robots that know about scientific costs and utility is an incredibly promising direction, but hard.
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