News & Events ( more..)
First official release June 21st (news)
2008-06-04 12:00:00
The first official release is its way. It has been delayed to June 21st from June 4th while we do internal testing to get rid of some pesky bugs. That will include
data from MACHO, TAOS, ESSENCE, OGLE (variables only).
A full suite of web services will be available along with
documentation and examples. Also a new search interface
will be available that allows all sort of queries.
Check it out !
Talk at New England Statistics Symposium (conference)
2008-04-26 03:45:00
Time Series participation at New England Statistics Symposium
with a talk at a special session "Time Series Models and Applications in Science and Engineering".
Talk given by Protopapas:
Event Discovery in Astronomical Time Series Using Scan Statistics.
See here for more details.
Official release 1 is set for June 4th (news)
2008-04-21 20:07:21
The official release 1 (beta 1) of TSC web services and search engines
as well as the first phase of the database will be on
June 4th following the brown bug presentation at IIC
by Rahul Dave.
Lead Investigator
Pavlos Protopapas received his PhD in 1996 at the University of Pennsylvania in theoretical nuclear physics. His thesis
provided a solution to the Coriolis attenuation problem. He served as the associate director of the National Scalable
Cluster Project (NSCP), one of the initial attempts at large scale distributing computing on a grid-like model. Protopapas
is a member of the outer solar system team for Pan-STARRS and the TAOS project. His research interests are in planetary
transits, the outer solar system, photometric variability, microlensing and in computer science on large databases and data mining
in astronomy in particular in feature extraction, anomaly detection, and similarity searches in time series.
more »
Pavlos Protopapas
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Harvard
University
60 Garden Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
+1 (617) 495 7026
Featured Projects
Outlier Detection
In the era of massive data sets, unexpected discoveries of astronomical phenomena through manual inspection of data is improbable if not impossible. Fortunately, automated 'anomaly' detection programs may be able to resurrect this mode of discovery and identify atypical phenomena indicative of novel astronomical objects.
We are interested in categorizing stars into known categories and finding stars whose brightness variation does not fit known categories, leading to new astronomical discoveries. We have developed PCAD, an unsupervised anomaly detection method that handles phase adjustments for large sets of periodic time-series data. The work needs to be extended to non-periodic data, and we want to develop clustering algorithms that are efficient in the face of noisy and voluminous data
more »Discovering Transiting Extra Solar Planets
We have developed an algorithm that allows fast and efficient detection of transits, including planetary transits, from light-curves. The method is based on building an ensemble of fiducial models and compressing the data using the MOPED algorithm. We will be searching for extra solar transit signatures in a huge collection of existing light curves (150 million light curves are in place at TSC right now).
more »Databases and Searches
This project's role is to lay the foundations for providing research output from the TSC. We have developed a metadata (position, time, color, variability) database, across surveys, provides a useful compendium of temporal information on the brightness variability (or lack thereof) of most objects in the sky. We are currently developing multiple search interfaces to such a database, so that light curves satisfying arbitrary criterions may be searched for interesting objects. The searches will include morphological searches which compare light curves for similarity (DEMO coming SOON!). All searches will be subscribable, and web service outputs with and without light curves will be provided. A further challenge involves calibrating magnitudes across different color bands from different surveys. See the Search section of the website for current functionality.
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