Date: 24Â – 27Â May 2016
Venue: Center of Mediterranean Architecture, Chania
Website:Â http://cosmo21.cosmostat.org
During the past 20 years there has been a resumption of a dialogue between astronomers and statisticians. This dialogue has been fruitful and has been the origin of a new discipline that is now widely called Astrostatistics. The main tools for comparing theoretical results with observations in astronomy are statistical. However, the development of huge astronomical databases presents challenges of scale, and has initiated an active use of newly-developed statistical techniques in astronomy, notable examples being sparsity and compressed sensing. The meeting is especially timely from the point of view of cosmological surveys, where the size makes application of a fully Bayesian analysis computationally extremely demanding, especially in the realm of model selection. Pan-STARRS will have a complete survey of 3Ï€ steradians of petabyte size; the Dark Energy Survey and the VST KiDS surveys will be well underway presenting similar difficulties in the data analysis. Moreover, the cosmological community will be preparing for LSST and for Euclid, a survey of a large fraction of the sky at an angular resolution close to that of the Hubble Space Telescope. Wide-field spectroscopic cosmology surveys of will be targeting over 10 million objects with a spectral resolution of 5000, with the SKA precursors will be grappling with data challenges which currently are unsolved. These examples also highlight the big current role and even bigger future role of archival data in astrophysics research. This meeting offers an opportunity to show-case techniques and methodologies that will have to be used by the wider community to use these archival data.
Date: 22Â – 24 May 2016
Venue: Center of Mediterranean Architecture, Chania
Website:Â http://ada8.cosmostat.org/
Held regularly since 2001, the ADA – Astronomical Data Analysis – conference series has been focused on algorithms and information extraction from astrophysics data sets. It became a strongly interdisciplinary forum where researchers from diverse fields such as Astronomy, Statistics, Mathematics and Computing could interact. This conference series has been characterized by a range of innovative themes, including multi-scale geometric transforms such as the curvelet transform, compressed sensing and clustering, always remaining closely linked to front-line open problems and issues in Astronomy. Along many of its editions, the ADA conference series included hands-on tutorial sessions on various topics of advanced data processing. In the era of large astronomical surveys that are grappling with unsolved methodological and data challenges, transforming Data into Science is a huge, and exciting, problem, and a large fraction of modern Astronomy depends on this. Nevertheless, postgraduate courses can hardly cope with the pace of development of the modern data analysis methods and tools that may enable researchers to make the best use of their data. This is the main focus of the ADA8 2016 Summer School: to present advanced data analysis methods and algorithms and to demonstrate how to use publicly available codes to improve knowledge extraction from astronomical datasets, enabling a better Science. These tutorials are not intended exclusively for an audience with background in Astrononomy, and are aimed mainly aimed for young researchers at MSc, PhD and postdoc levels, albeit any researchers are welcome to attend. Moreover, this year ADA will take place on the days preceding the COSMO21 conference, both event take place at the same venue and the inscription in COSMO21 includes the possibility to participate in the ADA8 Summer School.