News & Events ( more..)
First official release June 21st (news)
2008-06-04 12:00:00
Talk at New England Statistics Symposium (conference)
2008-04-26 03:45:00
Official release 1 is set for June 4th (news)
2008-04-21 20:07:21
Lead Investigator
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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