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The importance of peer-review in the scientific process can not be overestimated. Yet, due to increasing pressures of research and exponentially growing number of publications the task faced by the referees becomes ever more difficult. We…
The peer review system as used in several computer science communities has several flaws including long review times, overloaded reviewers, as well as fostering of niche topics. These flaws decrease quality, lower impact, slowdown the…
The distributed telescope array offers promise for conducting large-sky-area, high-frequency time domain surveys. Multiple telescopes can be deployed at each observation site, so intra-site observation task scheduling is crucial for…
Operation of the US Virtual Astronomical Observatory shares some issues with modern physical observatories, e.g., intimidating data volumes and rapid technological change, and must also address unique concerns like the lack of direct…
For time-domain astronomy, it is crucial to frequently image celestial objects at specific depths within a predetermined cadence. To fulfill these scientific demands, scientists globally have started or planned the development of…
A new method for absolute polarimetric calibration of large telescopes is presented. The proposed method is highly accurate and is based on the calibration of a small sub-aperture, which is then extended to the full system by means of…
The Astropy Project (http://astropy.org) is, in its own words, "a community effort to develop a single core package for Astronomy in Python and foster interoperability between Python astronomy packages." For five years this project has been…
Observatory libraries traditionally have maintained databases of publications resulting from usage of their facilities. In the era of electronic publication, the methodology of the creation of these databases has perforce changed as well.…
One of the virtues of peer review is that it provides a self-regulating selection mechanism for scientific work, papers and projects. Peer review as a selection mechanism is hard to evaluate in terms of its efficiency. Serious efforts to…
(Un)conscious bias affects every aspect of the astronomical profession, from scientific activities (e.g., invitations to join collaborations, proposal selections, grant allocations, publication review processes, and invitations to attend…
(Un)conscious bias affects every aspect of the astronomical profession, from scientific activities (e.g., invitations to join collaborations, proposal selections, grant allocations, publication review processes, and invitations to attend…
Adaptive Optics is a prime example of how progress in observational astronomy can be driven by technological developments. At many observatories it is now considered to be part of a standard instrumentation suite, enabling ground-based…
The European Southern Observatory (ESO) implemented a new paradigm called Distributed Peer Review (DPR) as part of its proposal evaluation process in Period 110. Under DPR, Principal Investigators who submit proposals agree to review a…
Telescope scheduling is the task of determining the best sequence of observations (pointings and filter choices) for a survey system. Because it is computationally intractable to optimize over all possible multi-year sequences of…
Peer reviews, evaluations, and selections are a fundamental aspect of modern science. Funding bodies the world over employ experts to review and select the best proposals from those submitted for funding. The problem of peer selection,…
The emergence of time-domain multi-messenger (astro)physics requires for new, improved ways of interchanging scheduling information, in order to allow more efficient collaborations between the various teams. Currently space- and…
Oral exams were common historically across academia, though their popularity has recently fallen. Many argue against them as an assessment technique because they are vulnerable to bias and subjectivity, difficult to administer, and…
(Abridged) Typically large telescope construction and operation costs scale up faster than their collecting area. This slows scientific progress, making it expensive and complicated to increase telescope size. A metric that represents the…
Meetings such as ADASS demonstrate that there is an enthusiasm for communication within the astronomical software community. However, the amount of information and experience that can flow around in the course of one, relatively short,…
The widespread dissemination of machine learning tools in science, particularly in astronomy, has revealed the limitation of working with simple single-task scenarios in which any task in need of a predictive model is looked in isolation,…