Announcing the LINCC Tech Talks series

Science
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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 ( 1pm in April and beyond), 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:

When: Thursday, April 13th, 10am Pacific

LINCC Frameworks Python Project Template - Start with more than Hello World (Drew Oldag)

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 & @aimalz .

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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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