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Seminar

Searching for Comets on the World Wide Web: Doing science with heterogeneous data

September 15, 2011

When: September 15, 2011 4:00PM

Dustin Lang

Princeton

In a recent paper, we did a Yahoo! Image Search for "Comet Holmes".  We fetched the thousands of images found, automatically calibrated them, and used the image footprints (in celestial coordinates) to recover the orbital parameters of the comet.

Starting with this example, I will talk about some of the opportunities, issues and challenges around using heterogeneous data (including crowd-sourced or web-trawled data) to answer scientific questions, and some of the technology we are developing to address these challenges. This technology includes the Astrometry.net automated calibration system, and a nascent project, "the Tractor", which reframes the problem of detecting and measuring astronomical objects in images into the framework of inference in a probabilistic generative model.  These tools also end up being useful for large-scale time-domain surveys such as the LSST.

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Dustin Lang
Dr. Dustin Lang got his Ph.D in the Machine Learning group at the University of Toronto, Department of Computer Science in 2009 with the thesis: Astrometry.net: Automatic recognition and calibration of astronomical images. He works on data-reduction software for imaging from the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), the new Hyper-Suprime Cam on the Subaru Telescope, and archival work on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey (CFHT-LS) and Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Dr. Lang also work with David Hogg (NYU) on variety of projects involving statistical inference, machine learning, Monte Carlo methods,and forward- or generative modeling for astronomical data, and with Julianne Dalcanton on the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury project, a huge Hubble Space Telescope project to tile a quarter of the Andromeda galaxy with 6-band photometry, from the UV to the near-IR (F275W and F336W using WFC3/UVIS, F475W and F814W using ACS/WFC, and F110W (1100 nm), and F160W (1600 nm) using WFC3/IR).

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