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The changing heavens have played a central role in the scientific effort of astronomers for centuries. Galileo's synoptic observations of the moons of Jupiter and the phases of Venus starting in 1610, provided strong refutation of Ptolemaic…
Sky coverage is one of the most important pieces of information about astronomical observations. We discuss possible representations, and present algorithms to create and manipulate shapes consisting of generalized spherical polygons with…
The Kepler survey has provided a wealth of astrophysical knowledge by continuously monitoring over 150,000 stars. The resulting database contains thousands of examples of known variability types and at least as many that cannot be…
Data challenges are emerging as powerful tools with which to answer fundamental astronomical questions. Time-domain astronomy lends itself to data challenges, particularly in the era of classification and anomaly detection. With improved…
Observational astrophysics uses sophisticated technology to collect and measure electromagnetic and other radiation from beyond the Earth. Modern observatories produce large, complex datasets and extracting the maximum possible information…
The U.S. Virtual Astronomical Observatory (VAO) is a product-driven organization that provides new scientific research capabilities to the astronomical community. Software development for the VAO follows a lightweight framework that guides…
The tens of millions of radio sources to be detected with next-generation surveys pose new challenges, quite apart from the obvious ones of processing speed and data volumes. For example, existing algorithms are inadequate for source…
Systematic surveys of astronomical objects often lead to discoveries, but always provide invaluable information for statistical studies of well-defined samples. They also promote follow-up investigations of individual objects or classes.…
The growing availability of Earth Observation (EO) data and recent advances in Computer Vision have driven rapid progress in machine learning for EO, producing domain-specific models at ever-increasing scales. Yet this progress risks…
The number of small satellites has grown dramatically in the past decade from tens of satellites per year in the mid-2010s to a projection of tens of thousands in orbit by the mid-2020s. This presents both problems and opportunities for…
An array of large observational programs using ground-based and space-borne telescopes is planned in the next decade. The forthcoming wide-field sky surveys are expected to deliver a sheer volume of data exceeding an exabyte. Processing the…
Data visualisation is an essential ingredient of scientific analysis, discovery, and communication. Along with a human (to do the looking) and the data (something to look at), an image display device is a key component of any data…
Analyzing high-dimensional data and finding hidden patterns is a difficult problem and has attracted numerous research efforts. Automated methods can be useful to some extent but bringing the data analyst into the loop via interactive…
Synoptic sky surveys are becoming the largest data generators in astronomy, and they are opening a new research frontier, that touches essentially every field of astronomy. Opening of the time domain to a systematic exploration will…
The field of astrophysics is continuously advancing, with an ever-growing influx of data requiring robust and efficient analysis tools. As the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescopes come fully operational, we anticipate the…
The Virtual Observatory (VO) is becoming the de-facto standard for astronomical data publication. However, the number of radio astronomical archives is still low in general, and even lower is the number of radio astronomical data available…
The singular way of scheduling at major observatories has favored certain types of astronomy. This has led to the discrimination of certain types of observations which could not be accommodated. It is the goal of future operations to open…
For decades, the growth and volume of digital data collection has made it challenging to digest large volumes of information and extract underlying structure. Coined 'Big Data', massive amounts of information has quite often been gathered…
Visualization techniques are well developed for many problem domains, but these systems break down for datasets which are very large or multidimensional. Techniques for data which is discrete rather than continuous are also less well…
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…