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Jan 31, 2013 1:00 PM
Keith Spalding 410
Andrew Drake, CACR
We have performed an extensive search for RR Lyrae among the 500 million sources observed by the Catalina Surveys. We detect ~26,000 type-AB RR Lyrae (of which 20,000 are new discoveries) from a region spanning 3/4 of the sky. By determining accurate distances to the stars, we investigate the spatial distribution of structures within the Milky Way halo. Combining the RR Lyrae distances with SDSS spectroscopy we are able accurately trace the velocities and metallicities of hundreds of sources within the Sagittarius tidal streams system. We find the first strong evidence for a dense tidal stream that overlaps the Sagittarius system to distances beyond 100kpc, yet remains unexplained by any existing model.
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Tuesday, January 29th
12:00 – 1:00pm
105 Annenberg
*Lunch will be provided*
SPEAKER:
Alexandre Cunha
Center for Advanced Computing Research and Elliot Meyerowitz Lab, Caltech
TITLE:
Collaborative Image Analysis with the Masses: Challenges and Opportunities
ABSTRACT:
Extracting reliable quantitative information from digital images in an automatic fashion continues to be a difficult task. In many situations classical and contemporary algorithms only provide partial and sub-optimal results that might not be sufficient to carry on research studies thus leading practitioners to rely on manual annotations. We present our work on collaborative image segmentation, an online crowdsourcing system where computers, experts, and non-experts cooperate to produce robust results supporting the research of plant biologists. We address some of the technical and nontechnical challenges in building such a system and discuss the potential in employing the vision of crowds to help solve image processing problems which are still poorly solved by computers alone.
This is a work in progress in collaboration with Elliot Meyerowitz lab at Caltech and with Tsang Ing Ren lab at UFPE, Brazil.
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Map covering around 29.4 by 24 degrees on the sky, indicating the huge scale of the newly discovered structure. Credit: R. G. Clowes / UCLan
An international team of astronomers, led by academics from the University of Central Lancashire and including CACR Senior Computational Scientist Matthew Graham, has found the largest known structure in the universe. The large quasar group (LQG) is so large that it would take a vehicle travelling at the speed of light some 4 billion years to cross it. The team published their results in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society…(more)
