The “Community Alert Brokers” session was designed to bring together members of the scientific community, broker teams, and project staff to discuss progress on the project’s plans for alert production and distribution and the latest in broker development.
A special emphasis was put on providing information about alerts and brokers to science community members who are new to these concepts, and as such this session has resulted in a valuable set of resources. If you’re new to alerts and brokering, one place to start is slides 17 and 18 in the slide deck for the “Introduction to Rubin” session (here); another is Section 3.5 “Alerts to DIASources” of the Data Products Definitions Document (DPDD).
Materials Voluntarily Prepared by the Broker Teams for the Science Community
ALeRCE: A video presentation on the ALeRCE broker, a slide presentation titled “The Universe in a stream: the ALeRCE broker”, and a set of jupyter notebooks demonstrating use cases for accessing the ALeRCE database, API, etc.
AMPEL: A slide presentation on AMPEL by Jakob Nordin.
ANTARES: A video presentation titled "Time-Domain Discovery in the 2020s Using the ANTARES Event Broker", a video demonstration of how to use the ANTARES broker web interface, and a video demonstration of how to use the ANTARES database to explore variability in light curves.
Fink: A video presentation titled “Fink - Enabling Time-Domain Astronomy in the Next Era” (view the slides).
Lasair: A video presentation titled “Lasair - UK:LSST Transient Broker” (view the slides).
Pitt-Google: A slide presentation on the “Pitt-Google Cloud-Based Broker” by Michael Wood-Vasey.
"Point of Interest" Variable Alerts: A slide presentation on the “Point of Interest” Variable Alerts broker by Nina Hernitschek.
SNAPS: A slide presentation on “SNAPS: The Solar System Notification Alert Processing System” by David Trilling
The intent of posting this Topic is to advertise the fact that you can watch the recorded session (here), look at the deck of slides used in the presentation (here), and find more resources on the “Community Support for Science” session page in the Rubin 2020 PCW website (here). A separate recorded presentation which provides a project update on the broker selection process and simulated alert packets for the broker teams is also available (here).
Follow-up questions about community alert brokers are welcome as replies on this Topic. Questions about the contents of the alert packets themselves are probably best suited to (and very welcome in!) the category “Data Q&A”.
Session Agenda (time in recording)
Primer on Alert/Broker Terminology (5:15)
Project Update: Broker Selection Process and Simulated Alerts (8:10)
Broker Team Flash Talks (31:45)