Announcing the LINCC Tech Talks series

Science Announcements
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#1

Hi everyone,

I’m very happy to announce a new monthly LINCC Tech Talks series.

Delivered virtually every second Thursday of the month at 10am Pacific (1pm ET, 3pm Chile (November and onwards), 7pm CET) these talks and demos will showcase work done by the broad Rubin software and archives community that’s designed to enable LSST science. We hope it will provide a forum for a range of groups and authors to present, learn about, and discuss efforts of interest to analysis of LSST data. The talks will be recorded and made publicly available.

We have started off the series with a talk by the LINCC Frameworks team; This and other previous recordings can be found at our channel here.

Current talk is: AI for (climate) good (speaker from Inria Chile)

When and where: Thursday, November 9th, 10am Pacific, on zoom

Zoom: https://ls.st/lincc-talks

Each talk is to be followed by lots of time for Q&A and discussions.

If you’re interested in presenting your work, or have any questions, please contact the tech talk series moderators Neven Caplar ncaplar@uw.edu or Colin Chandler coc123@uw.edu .

If you wish to receive future seminar announcements, add the following calendar, subscribe to this discussion, the #lincc-tech-talks channel on LSSTC Slack, or the LINCC announcements mailing list (send a blank e-mail to lincc-join@lists.lsst.org).

On behalf of the LINCC team, @mjuric, @nevencaplar & @ColinOrionChandler .

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LINCC Tech Talks series starting October 13, 2022
#2

Please join us for the LINCC Tech Talk next week, Thursday, November 10, at 10h PT = 13h ET = 14h CLT = 19h CET on Zoom. We will discuss topics related to time-domain astronomy. Will Barnes will talk about Sunpy, and Andjelka Kovacevic will present the periodicity pipeline InKind contribution to LSST project. Find their abstracts below.

Events are also advertised at our web page and also provided in calendar form; and the #lincc-tech-talks LSSTC Slack channel is always available for discussions before, during, and after the talks

sunpy: A community-driven, open-source Python package for solar data analysis

The sunpy package is an openly-developed, community-driven Python package for solar data analysis. It is designed to provide the fundamental tools for accessing, loading, and interacting with solar physics data in Python. In particular, sunpy provides search and download functionality, data containers for image and time series data, as well as commonly used coordinate frames and transformations between such frames. In this talk, I will give an overview of the capabilities of the sunpy package and provide some examples of the kind of workflows that sunpy enables. Furthermore, I will provide a brief overview of the SunPy Project, which includes the core maintainers of the sunpy package as well as the interoperable software ecosystem surrounding sunpy.

SER-SAG Periodicity pipeline Inkind contribution: overview of Conditional Neural Process module for nonparametric light curve modeling
A. Kovačević, D. Ilić, V. Radović, R. Street, L. Č. Popović, M. Nikolić, Yan-Rong Li, Shiyuan He, N. Andrić Mitrović, S. Simić, I. Čvorović-Hajdinjak

Conditional Neural Processes (CNPs) were created as an expansion of Generative Query Networks (GQNs) in sense to extend GQN training regime to tasks such as regression and classification. Here we describe the various components of a CNP module which is important segment of our pipeline for periodicity mining, which is part of the SER-SAG in-kind contribution to the LSST. We contrasted CNP to an example of application of the Deep Gaussian process. This presentation is not intended to promote specific algorithms, but rather to demonstrate how our in-kind contribution team applies nonparametric modeling to AGN light curves in preparation for LSST data.
The SER-SAG team is currently experimenting with these algorithms and welcomes feedback from the LSST community.

#3

thank you very much

#4

Please join us for the LINCC Tech Talk next week, Thursday, December 8, at 10h PT = 13h ET = 15h CLST = 19h CET on Zoom . We will hear from Francisco Förster Burón, who will present the ALeRCE broker. Find the abstract below.

Events are also advertised at our web page and also provided in calendar form ; and the #lincc-tech-talks LSSTC Slack channel is always available for discussions before, during, and after the talks

The ALeRCE broker: machine learning enabled processing of astronomical alert streams
A new generation of large aperture and large field of view telescopes is allowing the exploration of large volumes of the Universe in an unprecedented fashion. In order to take advantage of these new telescopes, notably the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a new time domain ecosystem is developing. Among the tools required are fast machine learning aided discovery and classification algorithms, interoperable tools to allow for an effective communication with the community and follow-up telescopes, and new models and tools to extract the most physical knowledge from these observations. In this talk I will review the challenges and progress of building one of these systems: the Automatic Learning for the Rapid Classification of Events (ALeRCE) astronomical alert broker. ALeRCE (http://alerce.science/) is an alert annotation and classification system led by an interdisciplinary and interinstitutional group of scientists from Chile since 2019. ALeRCE is focused around three scientific cases: transients, variable stars and active galactic nuclei. Thanks to its state-of-the-art machine learning models, ALeRCE has become the 2nd group to report most transient candidates to the Transient Name Server, and it is enabling new science with different astrophysical objects, e.g. AGN science. I will discuss some of the challenges associated with the problem of alert classification, including the ingestion of multiple alert streams, annotation, database management, training set building, feature computation and distributed processing, machine learning classification and visualization, or the challenges of working in large interdisciplinary teams. I will also show some results based on the real‐time ingestion and classification using the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) alert stream as input, as well as some of the tools available.

#5

As a reminder, we are not having the talk today due to a conflict with AAS meeting. We will be back in February (February 9, The TOM Toolkit and Skyportal). However, please see the special announcement below for LINCC incubators session happening on January 26!

We are excited to announce that on January 26, 2023, at 10am Pacific time on the LINCC Tech Talks Zoom, members of LINCC Frameworks leadership at LSSTC, CMU, and UW will hold an initial information session about the LINCC Frameworks Incubators program. The LINCC Frameworks team is working to provide robust open-source software tools to support analysis of LSST data at scale, and a key part of this is forming collaborations with the LSST science community.

The Incubator program, which starts in summer 2023 with a deadline for short proposals in February 2023, will provide dedicated funding and collaborations with software engineers to proposal teams who pitch compelling projects to be carried out in collaboration with the LINCC Frameworks team. Incubator projects should be aimed at solving computational challenges to develop open-source software that will enable a near-term science project using simulations and precursor data, and that serves as a starting point towards eventual LSST data analysis.

We will be sharing information about this program with the community prior to the information session; this information session will include a presentation and Q&A, all aimed at helping community members learn how they can engage with the Incubator program and develop compelling proposals for it.

For more announcements of this sort, please sign up for the LINCC mailing list; for regular information about LINCC Tech Talks, please add this calendar, subscribe to the discussion on community.lsst.org or join the #lincc-tech-talks channel on LSSTC Slack.

#6

This is a reminder of the LINCC Incubators information session (held in place of January’s Tech Talk) mentioned above! Stay tuned for further announcements about the February Tech Talk in the near future, but for now, here is more information:

We are excited to announce the launch of a website, call for proposals, and application form for the LINCC Frameworks Incubator program.

The LINCC Frameworks team is working to provide robust open-source software tools to support analysis of LSST data at scale, and a key part of this effort is the formation of collaborations with the LSST science community. On January 26, 2023, at 10am Pacific time on the LINCC Tech Talks Zoom, members of LINCC Frameworks leadership at LSSTC, CMU, and UW will hold an initial information session about this program. The session will be recorded for those who are unable to attend.

The Incubator program, which starts in summer 2023 with a deadline for short, stage-one proposals of 2023 February 21, will provide dedicated funding and collaborations with software engineers to proposal teams who pitch compelling projects to be carried out in collaboration with the LINCC Frameworks team. Incubator projects should be aimed at solving computational challenges to develop open-source software that will enable a near-term science project using simulations and precursor data, and that serves as a starting point towards eventual LSST data analysis.

The information session on January 26 will include a presentation and Q&A aimed at helping community members learn how they can engage with the Incubator program and develop compelling proposals for it.

For more announcements of this sort, please sign up for the LINCC mailing list. Those in the LSSTC Slack workspace can get more information about the Tech Talks in #lincc-tech-talks and can ask questions about the Incubator program in #lincc-incubator-help!

#7

Please join us for the LINCC Tech Talk next week, Thursday, February 9, at 10h PT = 13h ET = 15h CLST = 19h CET on Zoom . Rachel Street will present the TOM Toolkit, while Josh Bloom will cover SkyPortal. Find their abstracts below.

Events are also advertised at our web page and also provided in calendar form ; and the #lincc-tech-talks LSSTC Slack channel is always available for discussions before, during, and after the talks.

The TOM Toolkit: Observing platform for Rubin follow-up and recent upgrades for O4 (Rachel Street, William Lindstrom, Joey Chatelain)
Software tools provide a powerful way to streamline the process of deriving scientific results from discovery alerts. A TOM is a web-based service designed to gather and manage astronomical data, plan and execute observations on multiple telescope facilities, provide context and visualization tools and manage data processing and sharing. The platforms allow users to synthesize information from many sources, evaluate targets of interest and perform investigations. Web-based user interfaces allow team members around world access to the same tools and information, facilitating collaboration. The TOM Toolkit package makes it easy for any astronomer to operate and customize a TOM system for their science, while providing an advanced suite of ready-made tools and interfaces for key astrophysical services. In preparation for the upcoming O4 run of LIGO/Virgo/Kagra, the TOM team have been collaborating closely with the Multi-Messenger Astrophysics community to develop the Hermes platform. Hermes is a web-based messaging service built on Kafka that allows users to blend human and machine-readable communication. Users can share any type of message - e.g. discoveries, messages, photometry, and spectroscopy using an API and GUI that work with the TOM Toolkit.
In this talk, we will share the recent developments and other upgrades to the Toolkit planned in support of O4 and Rubin science.

SkyPortal: A technical ecosystem enabling multi-messenger astrophysics (Josh Bloom, Michael Coughlin)
Rapid and coordinated followup of neutrino and gravitational wave events require infrastructure to plan, command, and operate heterogeneous telescope networks. Beyond the initial Target of Opportunity coordination, however, such infrastructure must also be able to respond and adapt to the dynamic landscape of insights as candidates are observed, reported, and followed up. All of this must be done in a robust API centric system with human friendly interfaces. In this talk, addressing these requirements, we present the status of SkyPortal and the universe of telescopes in its orbit planned for use in O4. We discuss developing technologies inside of SkyPortal required to enable multi-messenger discoveries in the next observing run and beyond.

#8

Please join us for the LINCC Tech Talk next week, Thursday, March 9, at 10h PT = 13h ET = 15h CLST = 19h CET on Zoom. Our colleagues from Space Telescope will tell us about how they run their versions of Rubin Science Platform and Data Centers. Erik Tollerund will tell us about Juptyer notebooks that they serve, and Susan Mullally about MAST service. Find their abstracts below.

Jupyter and STScI: A Platform and a Tool (Erik Tollerud)
The Space Telescope Science Institute uses Jupyter, particularly its notebook element, as a major tool for communicating code with the science community. I will describe the current state of STScI’s use of Jupyter, with a particular emphasis on the continuous integration machinery that ensures the notebooks continue to work in the face of evolving software, as well as the process by which we ingest notebooks into that framework. I will also discuss how STScI notebook development fits in with near-term developments with science platforms and interactive analysis tools that work in Jupyter for the whole astronomical community (not just space missions).

MAST: A Multi-Mission Archive (Susan Mullally)
The Barbara A. Mukulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) is responsible for hosting and curating NASA’s UV, optical and IR data. MAST contains data from more than a dozen different missions going back more than 40 years, including flagship missions like HST and JWST along with survey missions like TESS and PanSTARRS. MAST works to provide a flexible, yet generic framework to serve all of the unique needs of its missions, including search forms, programmatic access, quick look tools, database access, and science platforms. In this talk I will describe some of the challenges we face and have overcome in curating an archive that serves data from a diverse set of missions to a diverse community of astronomers.

Events are also advertised at our web page and also provided in calendar form ; and the #lincc-tech-talks LSSTC Slack channel is always available for discussions before, during, and after the talks.

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#9

Please join us for the LINCC Tech Talk next week, Thursday, April 13, at 10h PT = 13h ET = 13h CLT (different time from the previous talk!) = 19h CET on Zoom. Our own LINCC software engineer Drew Oldag will tell us about an effort to help you start your new python projects quickly. Find his abstract below.

LINCC Frameworks Python Project Template -Start with more than Hello World

The LINCC Frameworks Python Project Template is a tool to accelerate the development of new Python projects. Our template provides functionality and tools to ease documentation,ensure code quality, and streamline distribution. It’s open source and well documented. And it’s available now to help get your project started or augment existing work. In the talk I’ll describe the reasons why templates are helpful for anyone developing software. I’ll cover the broad set of industry best-practices incorporated into the template, and the technology that powers it. LINCC Frameworks is excited to collaborate to make this a valuable tool for as many people as possible. So we’ll discuss some of the ways you can customize our template to suit specific needs while taking advantage of the features it provides.

Events are also advertised at our web page and also provided in calendar form ; and the #lincc-tech-talks LSSTC Slack channel is always available for discussions before, during, and after the talks.

#10

Please join us for the LINCC Tech Talk next week, Thursday, May 11, at 10h PT = 13h ET = 13h CLT = 19h CET on Zoom. Our colleagues at University of Washington, Joachim Moeyens and Spencer Nelson will present ADAM/THOR. Find their abstract below.

ADAM/THOR

We introduce THOR, the “Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery” algorithm, designed for linking observations of Solar System objects across multiple epochs without requiring intra-night tracklets or a predefined cadence of observations. By sparsely sampling the phase space with hypothetical test orbits, THOR can efficiently scan observational data to find candidate linkages, matching the performance of traditional tracklet-based algorithms. THOR has been demonstrated to work for the Main Belt population and outwards, with extensions planned to discover NEOs. We also present “Asteroid, Discovery, Analysis and Mapping” (ADAM), an in-development cloud-based platform focused on asteroid science and hosting large collections of point-source Solar System observational data. We plan to launch THOR on ADAM over the coming months. We describe the principal challenges we have faced in this work: data quality issues, API instability, and working with legacy systems. We trace these to possible systemic root causes in today’s astronomy software ecosystem. Despite these challenges, we emphasize THOR’s potential impact, offering up to a 2x boost in nightly sky coverage by removing the need for tracklets for surveys such as LSST. This necessitates the development of more advanced data platforms to fully harness THOR’s potential in asteroid science.

Events are also advertised at our web page and also provided in calendar form ; and the #lincc-tech-talks LSSTC Slack channel is always available for discussions before, during, and after the talks.

#11

Please join us for the LINCC Tech Talk next week, Thursday, June 08, at 10h PT = 13h ET = 13h CLT = 19h CET on Zoom. The talk will be given by our colleague Stephen Gwyn from Canadian Astronomy Data Center about infrastructure for moving object search. Find their abstract below.

Moving object image searches: a case study for metadata model

The Solar System Object Image Search (SSOIS) at the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre (CADC) allows users to find images of their favorite moving object. SSOIS scrapes metadata from the archives of telescopes around the world and ingests them into a simple metadata system. At search time, a user can specify a solar system object’s ephemeris either by object name, or by giving orbital elements, or by explicitly uploading a time series of positions. SSOIS then returns a list of images, with links back to the original telescope archive. The CADC also operates a much more intricate and comprehensive metadata system, the Common Archive Observation Model (CAOM). CAOM captures all the relevant information about an astronomical observation, be it a spectrum, an image or a data cube in a hierarchical metadata format. I will describe both SSOIS and CAOM, and contrast what drives the design of both metadata systems.

Events are also advertised at our web page and also provided in calendar form ; and the #lincc-tech-talks LSSTC Slack channel is always available for discussions before, during, and after the talks.

#12

Dear all,

Please join us for the LINCC Tech Talk next week, Thursday, July 13, at 10h PT = 13h ET = 13h CLT = 19h CET on Zoom (Launch Meeting - Zoom). The talk will be given by our colleagues Troy Raen (Caltech/IPAC), Christopher Hernández (University of Pittsburgh) and Michael Wood-Vasey (University of Pittsburgh) from The Pitt-Google LSST Community Alert Broker team. Find their abstract below.

The Pitt-Google LSST Community Alert Broker

The Pitt-Google Broker is an alert distribution service designed to provide real-time access to and classification of transient and variable events from astronomical surveys. We have been selected as a Community Alert Broker for the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space & Time (LSST), and our prototype has been processing the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) alert stream since late 2020. Our broker is built using the Google Cloud Platform and is designed around light-weight, publicly viewable, modules running on Google’s serverless, event-driven compute services Cloud Functions and Cloud Run. The modules communicate and serve data through the cloud-based services Google Pub/Sub, BigQuery, and Cloud Storage. Members of the scientific community and the public can access the data and Pub/Sub streams using any tool that can communicate with Google Cloud. We are developing a python API and examples to provide simple access for common use cases. We are currently preparing to participate in the Dark Energy Science Collaboration’s (DESC) ELAsTiCC Challenge, an exercise where simulated alerts are streamed to brokers for classification. We will use the ELAsTiCC challenge to demonstrate how community members might use our services. Specifically, our broker will serve the ELAsTiCC alerts and we will separately run a classifier that listens to the Pitt-Google stream, classifies the alerts in real time, and sends the results to DESC where our python API will be used by DESC to load the results to DESC’s internal transient database as an example of how other members of the scientific community can access events and classifications at LSST scale through our broker.

LINCC Tech Talks are held on the second Thursday of every month. Events are also advertised at our web page and also provided in calendar form; and the #lincc-tech-talks LSSTC Slack channel is always available for discussions before, during, and after the talks.

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#13

Dear all,

I hope you will join us for September LINCC Tech Talk session that will take place next week, Thursday, September 14, at 10h PT = 13h ET = 14h CST = 19h CET on Zoom (https://ls.st/lincc-talks). We will hear talks on collaboration with Roman telescope and their software effort. The talks will be given by our colleagues Knut Olsen (NOIRLab) & Harry Ferguson ( STScI), and Perry Greenfield (STScI). Find their abstracts below.

Technical topics of common interest to Rubin and Roman (Knut Olsen & Harry Ferguson)

Rubin Observatory, the flagship ground-based data-intensive facility of the next decade, is scheduled to start operations in 2025, and will ultimately produce a survey data volume approaching the Exascale. The Roman Space Telescope, which will observe an unprecedented deep, wide survey from space, is scheduled for launch in 2027, with an expected final data volume of tens of Petabytes. Both projects present significant data and software infrastructure challenges, which are in many cases similar in nature. In this presentation, we will outline technical topics of relevance to both the Rubin and Roman projects, and discuss the potential for sharing of experience and solutions.

Advanced Scientific Data Format (Perry Greenfield)

This presentation is intended to give a broad overview of the Advanced Scientific Data Format, focussing on the motivations for its development, a high-level outline of the structure and features of the format, the current state of development of the Python library supporting it as well as future plans for improvement and enhancement. It is currently being used for JWST, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, and various other projects, some outside of astronomy.

LINCC Tech Talks are held on the second Thursday of every month. Events are also advertised at our web page and also provided in calendar form; and the #lincc-tech-talks LSSTC Slack channel is always available for discussions before, during, and after the talks.

1 Like
#14

Dear all,

I hope you will join us for the October LINCC Tech Talk session that will take place next week, Thursday, October 12, at 10h PT = 13h ET = 14 CST = 19h CET on Zoom (https://ls.st/lincc-talks ). We will hear from Chris Lintott, who will talk about how citizen science will scale to LSST.

Planning for two million volunteers: Citizen Science Infrastructure at LSST scales

To be announced shortly

LINCC Tech Talks are held on the second Thursday of every month. Events are also advertised at our web page and also provided in calendar form; and the #lincc-tech-talks LSSTC Slack channel is always available for discussions before, during, and after the talks.

#15

Dear all,

Unfortunately, we must cancel tomorrow’s LINCC Frameworks talk due to a family emergency. We will aim to reschedule Chris Lintott’s talk for the future.

The next talk will be on November 9, given by a group from Centre Inria Chile. Stay tuned for the announcements that will follow.

#16

Please join us for the LINCC Tech Talk next week, Thursday, November 9, at 10h PT = 13h ET = 15 CST = 19h CET on Zoom . We will hear from Luis Marti, representing Inria Chile Institute, who will discuss their machine learning and artificial intelligence work on modeling complex systems.

AI for (climate) good

Artificial intelligence (AI) has a threefold role with respect to our understanding and impact on natural phenomena. As a first role, AI holds the key to understanding complex phenomena like those related to astrophysics or climate change. Second, AI is essential in a viable and sustainable holocene. The third one concerns the impact of AI (like the rest of information technology) as a contributing factor to pollution, CO2 generation, and climate change.

In this talk, I will dive into the underlying challenges we face when addressing the above problems. I will do this by going over some interrelated projects. First, I will be presenting our OcéanIA project focused on developing new AI, machine learning, and mathematical modeling tools to contribute to the understanding of the structure, functioning, underlying mechanisms, and dynamics of the global ocean symbiome and its relationship with climate change. After that, I will show our EMISTRAL project where we design and evaluate self-learning controllers for autonomous environmental monitoring sailboats relying on reinforcement learning, transfer learning, and autonomous learning for sampling the Ocean. Finally, we approach the other side of this dichotomy by looking inside AI as a way to make it more ecologically viable in our project GreenAI.

Events are also advertised at our web page and also provided in calendar form ; and the #lincc-tech-talks LSSTC Slack channel is always available for discussions before, during, and after the talks.

#17

I hope you will join us for the December LINCC Tech Talk session that will take place next week, Thursday, December 7, at 10h PT = 13h ET = 15 CST = 19h CET on Zoom (Launch Meeting - Zoom). Note the special time this month - the first Thursday of December! We will hear from Meg Schwab and Kaylee de Soto, who were scientists involved with the first round of LINCC incubators. They will showcase the projects, their experience with LINCC incubators and current/future plans. Please find their abstracts below.

Sorcha: A open-source LSST Solar System Simulator

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will discover over 5 million new Solar System bodies. This is an order of magnitude more objects than are currently known today in each of the Solar System’s small body reservoirs. LSST will go beyond just discovery, with a 10-year baseline the survey will be able to measure broad-band optical colors and phase curves, and capture episodes of cometary activity, orbit changes, rotational breakup events, and rotational brightness variations. Planetesimals are the bricks and mortar left over after the construction of planets. Their compositions, shapes, densities, rotation rates, and orbits help reveal their formation history, the conditions in the planetesimal-forming disk, and the processes active in the Solar System today. LSST will transform our current view of the Solar System and let us peer back into the Solar System’s past like never before. The LSST Solar System Science Collaboration (SSSC) has identified key software products/tools that must be developed by the Rubin user community to achieve the planetary community’s LSST science goals. Near the top of the SSSC’s software roadmap is a Solar System survey simulator to enable comparisons of model small body orbital and size/brightness distributions to LSST discoveries.
The goal of our LINCC Frameworks Incubator was to optimize and improve Sorcha, a modular python LSST Solar System Survey Simulator that takes a model Solar System small body population and uses the pointing history, observation metadata, and expected Rubin Observatory detection efficiency to output what LSST should find so that the numbers and types of simulated detections can be directly compared to the number and types of real small bodies found in the actual LSST survey. The Incubator has truly transformed our software package and made Sorcha, a powerful and fast source community-wide tool. In this talk, I’ll give an overview of Sorcha and update on the progress and successes for our incubator.

Superphot+: a LINCC Frameworks Incubator Pipeline

This talk introduces Superphot+, a new realtime classifier for supernovae discovered in the Zwicky Transient Facility alert stream. Superphot+ extracts summary features from supernova light curve data using a parametric model; these features are then used to classify events via a gradient-boosted machine. Superphot+ is available via pip and can be easily extended to LSST datastreams.

Events are also advertised at our web page and also provided in calendar form ; and the #lincc-tech-talks LSSTC Slack channel is always available for discussions before, during, and after the talks.

#18

I have a lecture at the university from 10:00 am to 10:30 am. I’ll join as soon as my class is over. See you soon, Hasan