Cambridge, MA, United States
The fifth .Astronomy conference was held at Microsoft Research's New England Research and Development (NERD) Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, hosted by the Seamless Astronomy group at Harvard's Center for Astrophysics. It was the first .Astronomy event in North America, bringing the conference to a new continent. 60% of attendees were new to the meeting. The gender balance was 33% female.
Organisers
- August Muench (Harvard-Smithsonian CfA)
- Alyssa Goodman (Harvard CfA)
- Alberto Pepe (Harvard CfA)
- Jenine Humber
- Jose Galache
- Louise Rubin
- Sarah Block
Talks
Talks
- Stuart Lynn (Zooniverse): A Smarter Zooniverse — real-time volunteer understanding and adaptive task routing
- Elisabeth Newton (Harvard): Astronomy Blogging and Astrobites — founding Astrobites as a gateway to the online astronomy community
- Curtis Wong (Microsoft Research): Outreach and Learning with Astronomy Data Visualization — WorldWide Telescope guided tours and large spatial-temporal datasets
- David Hogg (NYU): Crowdsourcing a High Dynamic-Range Image of the Entire Night Sky — building all-sky surveys from astrophotographer images on Flickr
- Alberto Accomazzi (SAO): The dotAstrophysics Data System — ADS 2.0 launch with public API, iterative search refinement, and grant acknowledgment queries
- Laura Trouille (Adler Planetarium / Northwestern): An Experiment in Supporting the Public in Research — Galaxy Zoo Quench: citizens doing end-to-end science with Zootools and Authorea
- Amy Robinson (EyeWire): EyeWire — a game to map the brain with 80,000 players, using citizen science to train machine learning algorithms
- Amanda Bauer (Australian Astronomical Observatory): Communication Strategies: How to Organize a Party in Space — defining goals, measuring impact, and promoting research
- Tony Hey (Microsoft Research): The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery — open access, the data deluge, cloud computing for science
Unconference Sessions
- Speaking up for diversity and equality
- AstroQuery: web tool for querying catalogs
- Outreach in public settings and measuring impact
- How to build a killer astronomy show with WWT
- Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs)
- Share the Love: a better system for credit in astronomy
- Connecting popular literature to the astro literature
- The future of astronomy figures in the literature
- Transitioning into industry from the ivory tower
- Indexing all the measurements in the literature
Stuart Lynn argued that as Big Data grows, citizen science projects need smarter analysis methods and better use of volunteer time. David Hogg presented a project using astronomical images posted to Flickr by astrophotographers worldwide to build an all-sky survey. Using astrometry.net to calibrate the images, his team was finding stars that the professional astronomical literature had never catalogued. Alberto Accomazzi announced the launch of ADS 2.0, featuring a new search engine with iterative refinement, a public API, and powerful query capabilities including grant acknowledgment searches and citation analysis.
// hacksHacks
The International Astronomical Union announced that extrasolar planets might get more interesting names. This hack is about a planet (Gliese 581d) that really wants a nice mythical name like the Solar System planets, and not to be named after a celebrity or someone's cat (Colin).
D3PO is designed to allow an astronomer, with no specialised data visualisation skills, to make an interactive, publication-quality figure with staged builds and linked brushing across plots.
A Python module to interact with NASA's ADS that Doesn't Suck.
Participants
- Adam Ginsburg (University of Colorado-Boulder)
- Adrian Price-Whelan (Columbia University)
- Alberto Accomazzi (Smithsonian/NASA ADS)
- Alberto Pepe (Harvard CfA)
- Alyssa Goodman (Harvard-Smithsonian CfA)
- Amanda Bauer (Australian Astronomical Observatory)
- Amy Robinson (EyeWire / MIT)
- Andy Casey (Harvard)
- August Muench (Harvard CfA)
- Brooke Simmons (Oxford Astrophysics)
- Carolina Ödman-Govender
- Chris Beaumont
- Curtis Wong (Microsoft Research)
- David Hogg (New York University)
- Demitri Muna (NYU)
- Elisabeth Newton (Harvard)
- Geert Barentsen
- Jenine Humber
- Jonathan Fay (Microsoft Research)
- Jose Galache
- Josh Peek
- Kelle Cruz
- Kevin Govender (IAU-OAD)
- Laura Trouille (Adler Planetarium / Northwestern University)
- Louise Rubin
- Michelle Borkin (Harvard)
- Niall Deacon
- Renée Hložek
- Robert Simpson (Oxford University)
- Ruth Angus
- Sarah Block (Harvard)
- Sarah Kendrew (MPIA)
- Stuart Lynn (Zooniverse)
- Tony Hey (Microsoft Research)
- Vanessa Moss
- Will Silversmith (EyeWire)