News & Events ( more... )
New search interface (news)
2009-03-04 17:54:09
We have released a new GUI search interface to the light curve
database. The new interface has sliders for specifying ranges, and
checkboxes for specifying the surveys, telescopes, and variable star
types you are interested in. It supports both a range search and a
cone search.
The search results are displayed both in an interactive table, and in a Google Sky viewer. You can click on any result in the Google Sky viewer to quicky see thumbnails of the light curves.
Additionally, some searches now execute much more rapidly, and we have added ASAS light curves.
Many more new features are coming soon, including an interactive light curve viewer, more data, and searching on additional parameters, such as star brightness and time ranges.
Please visit us often to keep up to date with all the improvements!
Postdoc position available (other)
2008-11-03 23:46:28
A postdoctoral position is available for an outstanding individual capable of taking a leading role in research on the analysis of scientific time series. The position is co-funded by the IIC Time Series Center at Harvard and by a recent NSF grant supporting Interdisciplinary Machine Learning Research and Education.
more »
Talk at Oreilly Ignite 4 (seminar)
2008-09-11 18:00:00
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.
more »