Related papers: Escaping from the herd of white elephants
In science, the lifecycle of software products is typically managed with limited resources while facing unlimited demand. Scientific software requirements are necessarily often dominated by internal project specifications and deadlines, but…
The astronomical community is grappling with the increasing volume and complexity of data produced by modern telescopes, due to difficulties in reducing, accessing, analyzing, and combining archives of data. To address this challenge, we…
ADASS has been a successful conference series for 24 years. If it is to continue to be successful and relevant we need to ensure that it provides what we as a community need from an annual conference. Earlier this year the ADASS Program…
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 NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is the primary Digital Library portal for researchers in astronomy and astrophysics. Over the past 30 years, the ADS has gone from being an astronomy-focused bibliographic database to an open digital…
Astronomical software is now a fact of daily life for all hands-on members of our community. Purpose-built software for data reduction and modeling tasks becomes ever more critical as we handle larger amounts of data and simulations.…
We live in a world where data generation is omnipresent. Innovations in computer hardware in the last few decades coupled with increasingly reliable connectivity among them have fueled this phenomenon. We are constantly creating and…
The work of astronomers is getting more complex and advanced as the progress of computer development occurs. With improved computing capabilities and increased data flow, more sophisticated software is required in order to interpret, and…
Recent and forthcoming advances in instrumentation, and giant new surveys, are creating astronomical data sets that are not amenable to the methods of analysis familiar to astronomers. Traditional methods are often inadequate not merely…
Nowadays, science has been coming into a new paradigm, called data-intensive science. While current studies of the new phenomenon focused on building up infrastructure for this new paradigm, yet a few studies concern users of scientific…
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…
The principle that research output should be open has, in recent years, been in-creasingly applied to data and software. Licensing is a key aspect to openness. Navi-gating the landscape of open source licenses can lead to complex…
Astronomy is increasingly encountering two fundamental truths: (1) The field is faced with the task of extracting useful information from extremely large, complex, and high dimensional datasets; (2) The techniques of astroinformatics and…
The SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) grew up with and has been riding the waves of the Information Age, closely monitoring and anticipating the needs of its end-users. By now, all professional astronomers are using the ADS on a daily…
About 32% of a software practitioners' day involves seeking and using information to support task completion. Although the information needs of software practitioners have been studied extensively, the impact of AI-assisted tools on their…
Automated Decision-Making Systems (ADS) have become pervasive across various fields, activities, and occupations, to enhance performance. However, this widespread adoption introduces potential risks, including the misuse of ADS. Such misuse…
Conversion of raw data into insights and knowledge requires substantial amounts of effort from data scientists. Despite breathtaking advances in Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), data scientists still spend the…
In the coming era of massive surveys (e.g. LSST, SKA), the role of the database designers and the algorithms they choose to adopt becomes the decisive factor in scientific progress. Systems that allow/encourage users/scientists to be more…
Access to astronomical data through archives and VO is essential but does not solve all problems. Availability of appropriate software for analyzing the data is often equally important for the efficiency with which a researcher can publish…
Astronomy is changing. Large projects, large collaborations, and large budgets are becoming the norm. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is one example of this new astronomy, and in operating the original survey, we put in place and…