Day Three of Astroinformatics 2013, hosted by CSIRO, is well underway. We are discussing advances in data processing, manipulation and management – crucial topics in modern astronomy. You can see the agenda here, along with a growing list of presentations, and you can follow on Twitter with the hashtag #astroinfo. Day Three is on YouTube at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fg1DvrPobm0
but note there are technical problems with the feed, and some of the talks will be uploaded later.
Today’s sessions emphasized “Astronomy Applications.” Tara Murphy gave an excellent summary on “Astroinformatics challenges for next generation radio transients surveys.” Her talk led to a vigorous discussion on the need for a powerful cross-match engine to support identification of newly discovered radio sources. Following on from that, Daniela Huppenkothen spoke about new methods for understanding transient variability. Giuseppe Longo gave a fine introduction to the application of data mining techniques. Alex Szalay gave an overview of the hardware, software and data management challenges inherent in data intensive astrophysics. Topics included were turbulence modeling, cosmology simulations, and dark matter simulations.
Re: cross-matching for radio sources, as you probably know in the past few years there have been some work on multimessenger collaborations, e.g. with Fermi LAT and various radio telescopes, with the goal of eventually integrating gravitational wave data into the picture. Much to be done, but I recall they were focusing on utilizing various VAO standards and approaches to automate low-level QA/C.