Related papers: A Modest Proposal for the Astronomical Community
Many real-world design problems involve optimizing an expensive black-box function $f(x)$, such as hardware design or drug discovery. Bayesian Optimization has emerged as a sample-efficient framework for this problem. However, the basic…
In March of 2024 the AAS formed our Graduate Admissions Task Force (GATF), asking us to produce recommendations aimed at improving the state of graduate admissions in astronomy. The task was a timely one, as the past decade has seen…
Warm and self-interactive dark matter cosmologies have been proposed as nonbaryonic solutions to the tensions between the $\Lambda$ cold dark matter model and observations at the kiloparsec scale. In this paper, we used the dark matter-only…
Radio astronomy has traditionally depended on observatories allocating time to observers for exclusive use of their telescopes. The disadvantage of this scheme is that the data thus collected is rarely used for other astronomy applications,…
It is commonplace in cosmology to analyze fields projected onto the celestial sphere, and in particular density fields that are defined by a set of points e.g. galaxies. When performing an harmonic-space analysis of such data (e.g. an…
The "crisis of reproducibility" has been a significant source of controversy, heated debate, and calls for reform to institutional science in recent years. As a long-term solution to address both the present crisis and future obstacles, I…
The NSF's Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship (AAPF) is exceptional among the available postdoctoral awards in Astronomy and Astrophysics. The fellowship is one of the few that allows postdoctoral researchers to pursue an…
The astronomy communities are widely recognised as mature communities for their open science practices. However, while their data ecosystems are rather advanced and permit efficient data interoperability, there are still gaps between these…
The LOw FRequency ARray - LOFAR is a new radio telescope that is moving the science of radio pulsars and transients into a new phase. Its design places emphasis on digital hardware and flexible software instead of mechanical solutions.…
Feature selection is popular for obtaining small, interpretable, yet highly accurate prediction models. Conventional feature-selection methods typically yield one feature set only, which might not suffice in some scenarios. For example,…
Gamma-ray observations of Milky Way dwarf galaxies have been used to place stringent constraints on the dark matter's annihilation cross section. In this paper, we evaluate the sensitivity of the proposed Advanced Particle-astrophysics…
From the moment astronomical observations are made the resulting data products begin to grow stale. Even if perfect binary copies are preserved through repeated timely migration to more robust storage media, data standards evolve and new…
We argue that it is essential that the Astro2020 survey of the present state of American astronomy and the recommendations for the next decade address the issue of ensuring preservation of, and making more discoverable and accessible, the…
Radio astronomy provides a unique window on the universe, allowing us to study: non-thermal processes (galactic nuclei, quasars, pulsars) at the highest angular resolution using VLBI, with low opacity. It is the most interesting wave band…
Learning and remembering to use APIs are difficult. Several techniques have been proposed to assist developers in using APIs. Most existing techniques focus on recommending the right API methods to call, but very few techniques focus on…
The Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA (ALFALFA) survey is designed to explore the z=0 HI mass function (HIMF) over a cosmologically significant volume. ALFALFA will improve on previous determinations of the HIMF by its combination of depth, wide…
We have been recently faced with the problem of cross--identifying stars recorded in historical catalogues with those extracted from recent fully digitized surveys (such as DENIS and 2MASS). Positions mentioned in the old catalogues are…
Threshold aggregation reporting systems promise a practical, privacy-preserving solution for developers to learn how their applications are used "\emph{in-the-wild}". Unfortunately, proposed systems to date prove impractical for wide scale…
The Breakthrough Starshot project aims to send centimeter-sized, gram-scale "StarChip" probes to Alpha Centauri at a speed of $\sim0.2c$. On the other hand, Zhang \& Li recently proposed that trans-relativistic cameras may be sent to any…
In this whitepaper we advocate that the Planetary Science (PS) community build a discipline-specific digital library, in collaboration with the existing astronomy digital library, ADS. We suggest that the PS data archives increase their…