Related papers: Software Use in Astronomy: an Informal Survey
Large Language Models (LLMs) are shifting how scientific research is done. It is imperative to understand how researchers interact with these models and how scientific sub-communities like astronomy might benefit from them. However, there…
We gained insight into ideas and beliefs on testing of students who finished an introductory course on programming without any formal education on testing. We asked students to fill in a small survey, to do four exercises and to fill in a…
Modern research in the sciences, engineering, humanities, and other fields depends on software, and specifically, research software. Much of this research software is developed in universities, by faculty, postdocs, students, and staff. In…
Tensors (also commonly seen as multi-linear operators or as multi-dimensional arrays) are ubiquitous in scientific computing and in data science, and so are the software efforts for tensor operations. Particularly in recent years, we have…
Cloud computing is gaining more and more traction as a deployment and provisioning model for software. While a large body of research already covers how to optimally operate a cloud system, we still lack insights into how professional…
The Astrophysics Source Code Library (ASCL) is a free online registry for source codes of interest to astronomers, astrophysicists, and planetary scientists. It lists, and in some cases houses, software that has been used in research…
Robots that support humans by performing useful tasks (a.k.a., service robots) are booming worldwide. In contrast to industrial robots, the development of service robots comes with severe software engineering challenges, since they require…
In recent years, the data science community has pursued excellence and made significant research efforts to develop advanced analytics, focusing on solving technical problems at the expense of organizational and socio-technical challenges.…
Nowadays, scripting programming languages like Python, Perl and Ruby are widely used in system programming, scientific computing, etc. Although solving a particular problem in these languages requires less time, less programming effort, and…
In the rapidly evolving field of software engineering, the skills required of graduates entering the job market are constantly changing. Several studies have identified a gap between the skills taught in university curricula and those…
Machine learning has rapidly become a tool of choice for the astronomical community. It is being applied across a wide range of wavelengths and problems, from the classification of transients to neural network emulators of cosmological…
Understanding astrophysical and cosmological processes can be challenging due to their complexity and lack of intuitive analogies. To address this, we present \texttt{AstronomyCalc}, a Python package specifically designed to aid…
A major determinant of the quality of software systems is the quality of their requirements, which should be both understandable and precise. Most requirements are written in natural language, good for understandability but lacking in…
Most students do not enroll in introductory astronomy as part of their major; for many, it is the last science course they will ever take. Thus, it has great potential to shape students' attitudes toward STEM fields for the rest of their…
This elementary review covers the basics of working with astronomical data, notably with images, spectra and higher-level (catalog) data. The basic concepts and tools are presented using both application software (DS9 and TOPCAT) and…
Pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have recently emerged as a breakthrough technology in natural language processing and artificial intelligence, with the ability to handle large-scale datasets and exhibit remarkable performance…
Peer review is a key activity intended to preserve the quality and integrity of scientific publications. However, in practice it is far from perfect. We aim at understanding how reviewers, including those who have won awards for reviewing,…
Amateur contributions to professional publications have increased exponentially over the last decades in the field of Planetary Astronomy. Here we review the different domains of the field in which collaborations between professional and…
Robotics software is pushing the limits of software engineering practice. The 3rd International Workshop on Robotics Software Engineering held a panel on "the best practices for robotic software engineering". This article shares the key…
The Standards of Fundamental Astronomy (SOFA) is a service provided by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) that offers algorithms and software for astronomical calculations, which was released in two versions by FORTRAN 77 and ANSI…