Category Archives: news

FRIDAY, 6 JANUARY 2017
Special Session: Perspectives in Research Software: Education, Funding, Reproducibility, Citation, and Impact
10:00 am – 11:30 am
Grapevine 2

The Moore-Sloan Data Science Environment at NYU and the ASCL have organized a Special Session at January’s AAS. The session, Perspectives in Research Software: Education, Funding, Reproducibility, Citation, and Impact, will be moderated by Bruce Berriman (IPAC, Caltech/Astronomy Computing Today). The session will feature short presentations and will include a discussion period with the floor open for questions and comments, and maybe even a few answers, too. The topics and presenters are :

Tracy Teal (Data Carpentry), Software not as a service
Michael Hucka (Caltech), Finding the right wheel when you don’t want to reinvent it
Lior Shamir (LTU), Reproducibility and reusability of scientific software
Ivelina Momcheva (STScI), Funding research software development
Heather Piwowar (ImpactStory), Capturing the impact of software
David W. Hogg (NYU), The relationships between software publications and software systems
Alice Allen (ASCL), Update on research software citation efforts

That last speaker looks a wee bit dodgy, but the moderator and other panelists are aces! And you, software authors and users, are as always important participants in the discussion. I hope to see you there!

Software events at AAS 229, Grapevine

And here it is: the Big List o’ Software Stuff at next month’s AAS meeting. If I missed anything, please let me know in the comments below; thanks!

TUESDAY, 3 JANUARY 2017
Workshops
Introduction to Software Carpentry, 8:00 am ‐ 5:30 pm, Appaloosa 1
Using Python for Astronomical Data Analysis, 8:30 am ‐ 5:00 pm, Texas C

WEDNESDAY, 4 JANUARY 2017
Splinter meeting: Flexible Multi‐dimensional Modeling of Complex Data in Astronomy, 9:30 am ‐ 11:30 am, Grapevine 4

Poster presentations
146.04 Gemini Planet Imager Calibrations, Pipeline Updates, and Campaign Data Process
146.07 Reprocessing of Archival Direct Imaging Data of Herbig Ae/Be Stars
146.13 Finding Planets in K2: A New Method of Cleaning the Data
146.17. Searching for Wide, Planetary-Mass Companions in Archival Spitzer/IRAC Data
154.25 Automated Detection of Dwarf Galaxies and Star Clusters in SMASH through the NOAO Data Lab
154.27 On the Quantification of Incertitude in Astrophysical Simulation Codes
155.13 Spectro-spatial reconstruction of Wide Field Imaging Interferometry Testbed (WIIT) data

Oral presentations
Testing SMBH scaling relations using cosmological simulations and optical/near-IR imaging data, 10:00 am – 10:20 am, Grapevine C
An Empirical Examination of the NEOWISE Results and Data analysis, 10:50 am – 11:00 am, Texas 4
Data Simulation for 21 cm Cosmology Experiments, 2:40 pm – 2:50 pm, Grapevine C

THURSDAY, 5 JANUARY 2017
Poster presentations
Session 236: Computation, Data Handling, Image Analysis & Light Pollution (21 posters)

239.03, The era of synoptic galactic archeology: using HST and Chandra observations to constrain the evolution of elliptical galaxies through the spatial distribution of globular clusters and X-ray binaries
244.05, Three-Dimensional Simulations of the Convective Urca Process in Pre-Supernova White Dwarfs

Oral presentations
Mind the Gap when Data Mining the Ritter-Kolb Cataclysmic Variable Catalogue, 10:00 am – 10:10 am, Fort Worth 6
What drives the kinematic evolution of star-forming galaxies? 10:20 am – 10:30 am, Grapevine 2
Simulating Galactic Winds on Supercomputers, 2:50 pm – 3:10 pm, Grapevine A
Photometric Redshifts for High Resolution Radio Galaxies in the SuperCLASS Field, 3:10 pm – 3:20 PM, Grapevine A

FRIDAY, 6 JANUARY 2017
Special Session: Perspectives in Research Software: Education, Funding, Reproducibility, Citation, and Impact, 10:00 am – 11:30 am, Grapevine 2

Poster presentations
335.05, When Will It Be …?: U.S. Naval Observatory Religious Calendar Computers Expanded
336.09, Variable Stars as an Introduction to Computational Research
345.03, An ALMA Survey of Planet Forming Disks in Rho Ophiuchus
345.19, Chemistry of protostellar envelopes and disks: computational testing of 2D abundances
348.06, Computing Architecture for the ngVLA

Oral presentations
K2 red giant asteroseismology using Bayesian Asteroseismology data Modeling (BAM), 10:24 am – 10:36 am, Grapevine B
Upgrades to MINERVA control software, 2:00 pm – 2:10 pm, Texas D

SATURDAY, 7 JANUARY 2017
Special Session: Statistical, Mathematical and Computational Methods for Astronomy (ASTRO): SAMSI 2016-17, 10:00 am – 11:30 am, Grapevine 2

Workshop: Hack Together Day, 10:00 am ‐ 7:00 pm, Grapevine 4 (Info and registration)

Also of likely interest is the Special Session on The Value of Astronomical Data and Long Term Preservation that will take place on Thursday, 4 January from 10:00 am – 11:30 am in Texas 3.

OpenCon2016 Day 0

I’m attending OpenCon2016 (#OpenCon) in Washington, DC this weekend; this is a meeting of people from around the world who are improving access to data, software, and educational materials for better science, research, and education.

Tonight was an informal reception at the conference hotel. I picked up my badge from Nicole Allen and Brady Yano, and immediately got into conversation with Cody Taylor from the University of Oklahoma Libraries, where he is an Emerging Technologies Librarian. His work includes working with professors to make textbooks open access to reduce costs. Kristofferson Culmer, a PhD student in computer science at the University of Missouri and also President of the National Association of Graduate-Professional Students (NAGPS) joined us. This is Kristofferson’s third OpenCon; as Cody and I are both OpenCon newbies, our conversation included a bit of Q&A about the conference itself.

After leaving Cody and Kristofferson, I walked over to a small group of people that included Erin McKiernan, a physics professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and whose tweets frequently appear in my Twitter feed, and my target for walking in that direction, Peter Murray-Rust, a chemist at the University of Cambridge. Peter and I had exchanged tweets when we were both in Portland at Force2016 this past April — not that I remembered that initially — and I’ve been following him ever since. I had a reason for seeking him out tonight, as in my earlier conversation, I learned that Peter has a content mining tools that might help the ASCL: ContentMine. Yes! I cannot wait to start using it! We also talked about the state of data representation in chemistry and astrophysics and how closed chemistry is, with theses embargoed in some universities for five (!!) years. (Wow!)

I had a great conversation next with Thomas Hervé Mboa Nkoudou; he is studying Scholarly Communication at Université Laval and is from Cameroon, where he started a school. He’s very interested in science and in promoting research done in Africa and Haiti, and in the maker movement in education. We also talked about astronomy education. After that, I met Daniel Himmelstein from the University of Pennsylvania and Vinodh Ilangovan from the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, with whom I lamented my apparent inability to find Jon Tennant, the one person I actually expected to meet tonight!

This is a conference of mostly young people — grad students and early career — who have amazing (quite daunting!) accomplishments and are working hard to make knowledge more accessible. I am really looking forward to the next two days! I’m participating, too, with a two-minute presentation on Saturday on the ASCL, and an unconference session on Sunday on encouraging software release and citation.

October 2016 additions to the ASCL

Sixteen codes were added to the ASCL in October 2016:

BurnMan: Lower mantle mineral physics toolkit
BXA: Bayesian X-ray Analysis
C3: Command-line Catalogue Crossmatch for modern astronomical surveys
CERES: Collection of Extraction Routines for Echelle Spectra

cluster-in-a-box: Statistical model of sub-millimeter emission from embedded protostellar clusters
DSDEPROJ: Direct Spectral Deprojection
Fourierdimredn: Fourier dimensionality reduction model for interferometric imaging
Freddi: Fast Rise Exponential Decay accretion Disk model Implementation

gatspy: General tools for Astronomical Time Series in Python
GSGS: In-Focus Phase Retrieval Using Non-Redundant Mask Data
MC3: Multi-core Markov-chain Monte Carlo code
MUSE-DRP: MUSE Data Reduction Pipeline

NuPyCEE: NuGrid Python Chemical Evolution Environment
Piccard: Pulsar timing data analysis package
PyMC3: Python probabilistic programming framework
velbin: radial velocity corrected for binary orbital motions

First look at software activities at AAS 229

Though we have a way to go before January’s AAS meeting (and ADASS and OpenCon on the ASCL’s schedule coming up sooner), a look at the schedule for the AAS meeting already shows multiple options for the computationally-inclined astronomer. I’m very excited about the Special Session we’ve organized with the Moore-Sloan DSE, called Perspectives in Research Software. Bruce Berriman (IPAC, Caltech/Astronomy Computing Today) will moderate the session. In keeping with previous sessions, the session will include a discussion period with the floor open for questions and comments; we want to hear what you have to say. We have a panel of seven speakers; the presenters and topics are:

Tracy Teal (Data Carpentry), Software not as a service
Michael Hucka (Caltech), Finding the right wheel when you don’t want to reinvent it
Lior Shamir (LTU), Reproducibility and reusability of scientific software
Ivelina Momcheva (STScI), Funding research software development
Heather Piwowar (ImpactStory), Capturing the impact of software
David W. Hogg (NYU), The relationships between software publications and software systems
And me, Update on research software citation efforts

I hope to see you there!

Other software events that have shown up so far on the AAS schedule are listed below. Good times coming!

Tuesday, 3 January 2017
Workshop: Introduction to Software Carpentry, 8:00 am ‐ 5:30 pm
Workshop: Using Python for Astronomical Data Analysis, 8:00 am ‐ 4:30 pm

Wednesday, 4 January 2017
Splinter Meeting: Flexible Multi‐dimensional Modeling of Complex Data in Astronomy, 9:30 am ‐ 11:30 am

Friday, 6 January 2017
Special Session: Perspectives in Research Software: Education, Funding, Reproducibility, Citation, and Impact, 10:00 am – 11:30 am

Saturday, 7 January 2017
Special Session: Statistical, Mathematical and Computational Methods for Astronomy (ASTRO): SAMSI 2016-17, 10:00 am – 11:30 am
Workshop: Hack Together Day, 10:00 am ‐ 7:00 pm

Also of likely interest is the Special Session on The Value of Astronomical Data and Long Term Preservation that will take place on Thursday, 4 January from 10:00 am – 11:30 am.