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OGLE III and MOA II are discovering 600-1000 Galactic Bulge microlens events each year. This stretches the resources available for intensive follow-up monitoring of the lightcurves in search of anomalies caused by planets near the lens…
State-of-the-art space science missions increasingly rely on automation due to spacecraft complexity and the costs of human oversight. The high volume of data, including scientific and telemetry data, makes manual inspection challenging.…
The Hubble Space Telescope's mission is summarized, with special emphasis placed on the Space Telescope Science Institute's unique experience with Hubble's behavior as an astronomical telescope in the environment of low earth orbit for over…
The investigation of the emergence of life is a major endeavour of science. Astronomy is contributing to it in three fundamental manners: (1) by measuring the chemical enrichment of the Universe, (2) by investigating planet formation and…
How can we discover objects we did not know existed within the large datasets that now abound in astronomy? We present an outlier detection algorithm that we developed, based on an unsupervised Random Forest. We test the algorithm on more…
Current and future large astronomical surveys will yield multiparameter databases on millions or even billions of objects. The scientific exploitation of these will require powerful, robust, and automated classification tools tailored to…
Astronomy produces extremely large data sets from ground-based telescopes, space missions, and simulation. The volume and complexity of these rich data sets require new approaches and advanced tools to understand the information contained…
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,…
An automated, rapid classification of transient events detected in the modern synoptic sky surveys is essential for their scientific utility and effective follow-up using scarce resources. This presents some unusual challenges: the data are…
This note gives a short review of the statistical issues concerning upper limit calculation and claiming of discovery arising in the search for exotic physics with neutrino telescopes. Low sample sizes and significant instrumental…
The study of the Universe and all its contents, the physical phenomena and the evolution of the sky objects has always attracted the Humanity. The Astronomy begins to try to explain these things, others sciences too. Therefore, we think a…
Much of the science case for the next generation of deep, wide-field optical/infrared surveys has been driven by the further study of dark energy. This is a laudable goal (and the subject of a companion white paper by Zhan et al.). However,…
We should be in a golden age of scientific discovery, given that we have more data and more compute power available than ever before, plus a new generation of algorithms that can learn effectively from data. But paradoxically, in many…
Observational astronomy has changed drastically in the last decade: manually driven target-by-target instruments have been replaced by fully automated robotic telescopes. Data acquisition methods have advanced to the point that terabytes of…
Modern astronomy has been rapidly increasing our ability to see deeper into the universe, acquiring enormous samples of cosmic populations. Gaining astrophysical insights from these datasets requires a wide range of sophisticated…
High precision astrometry provides the foundation to resolve many fundamental problems in astrophysics. The application of astrometric studies spans a wide range of fields, and has undergone enormous growth in recent years. This is as a…
Over the past decade, neutrino astronomy has emerged as a new window into the extreme and hidden universe. Current-generation experiments have detected high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin and identified the first sources, opening…
For centuries, astronomers have discussed the possibility of inhabited worlds - from Herschel's 18th-century observations suggesting Mars may host life, to the systematic search for technosignatures that began in the 1960s using radio…
The study of planets beyond the solar system and the search for other habitable planets and life is just beginning. Ground-based (radial velocity and transits) and space-based surveys (transits and astrometry) will identify planets spanning…
Identifying and predicting the factors that contribute to the success of interdisciplinary research is crucial for advancing scientific discovery. However, there is a lack of methods to quantify the integration of new ideas and…