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California Institute of Technology
Cahill Center for Astronomy & Astrophysics
Pasadena, CA, USA – June 16-19, 2010
CACR is co-sponsoring an international conference on the emerging field of AstroInformatics. AstroInformatics is envisioned as a broader intellectual, organizational, and funding environment, within which Virtual Observatories serve as particular institutions and provide fundamental functionalities and infrastructure. Our goal is to both empower and engage the astronomy and applied computer science communities in developing and deploying new tools and methods, enabled by the computation and information technologies.
The conference will bring together a broad range of experts in these and related fields, and address a wide range of topics, including knowledge extraction from massive and complex data sets, trends in computing technologies, visualization, novel scholarly communication, collaboration, education tools and environments, new and emerging modalities for scientific publishing, community development and sociological changes prompted by the evolving scientific methodology and technology, inter-disciplinary connections, etc. The last day of the conference will be devoted to the Practical AstroSemantics workshop.
The conference will consist of a small number of invited review talks, and panel-led discussions. Talks will be given by several CACR staff members, including Matthew Graham, Santiago Lombeyda, and Mark Stalzer
For more information or to register, visit http://www.astro.caltech.edu/ai10
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CACR is proud to announce that two of our employees received recognition at Caltech’s 55th annual Service Awards Ceremony, held in Beckman Auditorium on Thursday, June 3, 2010.
Roy Williams (25 years) is a member of the professional staff at CACR. He received a BA in mathematics from Trinity College, Cambridge University, in 1979, and a PhD in physics from Caltech in 1983. Following a research fellowship at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford University, and the Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory in England, Roy returned to Caltech in 1986 to join CACR’s precursor, the CCSF. His initial research interest was nuclear physics and subsequently the numerical solution of partial differential equations. Roy’s current research focuses on providing meaningful access to scientific data. He is one of the leaders in the development of astronomical virtual observatories worldwide, and he is active in public outreach efforts for digital sky surveys. Roy is a pioneer in real-time astronomy, where astronomical images taken nightly are scanned for changes, looking for events such as exploding stars. He is also working with LIGO on the public release of its data.
Jan Lindheim (20 years) came to Caltech in 1989 as a Computing Analyst at the Caltech Concurrent Supercomputing Facility (CCSF). CCSF later transformed into today’s CACR, where Jan is currently a Senior Systems Analyst. In the late 1990s, Jan played a key role in building and managing early Beowulf clusters. In 2002, CACR was selected by the National Science Foundation to host compute and storage systems serving the NSF user community as part of the TeraGrid. Jan’s sysadmin and support skills helped enable scientific research on leading edge supercomputers. His current activities include systems administration and support for Caltech’s Predictive Science Academic Alliance Program center.
Many thanks to Roy and Jan for their many years of service to the institute and to CACR!
