California Institute of Technology
Cahill Center for Astronomy & Astrophysics
Pasadena, CA, USA

The California Institute of Technology is hosting this 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, and 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.  Contributed papers are accepted as posters.

For more information or to register, visit http://www.astro.caltech.edu/ai10

This is the final call for registration for the .Astronomy 2009 meeting to be held in the Lorentz Center in Leiden from 30 Nov 2009 through 4 Dec 2009. The .Astronomy conference series explores the connection between astronomy and the Internet. More information about the meeting is available on the conference website http://dotastronomy.com/.

Astronomy is facing a paradigm shift. The huge quantities of data that will be generated by a new generation of surveys and instruments require new ways of thinking. At the same time, an ever more connected world is bringing astronomy to the masses by the vast possibilities of the web, via  blogs,podcasts, social networks and more.

Google Sky and Microsoft’s Worldwide Telescope have taken astronomy into the home with stunning elegance. Exciting citizen science projects enlist the general public into world-class astronomy research. Data mining, robotic telescopes and virtual observatories will soon takepetabytes of data to a global audience of professionals and amateurs. Communication and networking technologies are changing science, for both researchers and the public alike.

In 2008, the first .Astronomy conference took place in Cardiff, to discuss the ideas and methods emerging in this new era and the way in which they present interesting and novel opportunities for both conducting and communicating astronomy.

Themes and topics

• Citizen Science
  Galaxy Zoo
  Web-based platforms for citizen science projects
  Future citizen science projects
  New media for outreach and communication
  IYA 2009 and the web
• Podcasting and blogging astronomy
• Microblogging
  Networked technologies for research
• Virtual observatory
• Literature tools
• Data mining
  Visualisation concepts
• Google Sky, Microsoft Worldwide Telescope
• Visualisation as a research aid

An entire day of the workshop will be devoted to an “Astronomy Hack Day”, where developers can
work together on novel astronomy-related applications. We will be working with both web based
software, software for mobile platforms such as the Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android phones, as
well open hardware projects based on the Arduino microprocessor board. We aim to lay the basis for
several new citizen science projects during the .Astronomy week.

Workshop format

We plan to have talks in the morning of every day, with the afternoon reserved for working break-out groups or discussion sessions.  This means the number of “formal talks” will be quite limited, but everyone will have a chance to speak their mind. Each day will deal with one of the above themes, with the 5th day devoted to the Hack Day.

Scientific organizing committee

Dr. Alasdair Allan, University of Exeter (@aallan)
Dr. Sarah Kendrew, University of Leiden (@sarahkendrew)
Dr. Chris Lintott, University of Oxford (@chrislintott)
Dr. Stuart Lowe, University of Manchester (@astronomyblog)
Dr. Carolina Ödman, University of Leiden/Universe Awareness (@carolune)
Mr. Robert Simpson, University of Cardiff (@orbitingfrog)

.Astronomy and the International Year of Astronomy

The United Nations proclaimed 2009 the International Year of Astronomy (IYA2009) in celebration of the anniversary of Galileo Galilei’s first astronomical observations through a telescope. The vision of the IYA is to “help the citizens of the world rediscover their place in the Universe through the day- and night-time sky, and thereby engage a personal sense of wonder and discovery”. The internet has been instrumental in bringing the activities of the IYA to a huge public with blogs, podcasts andwebcasts. During the .Astronomy workshop we will review the success of these initiatives and discuss how to keep the momentum of the IYA into the coming years.

This workshop is an official IYA2009 conference.

The organizing committee is pleased to announce the opening of registration for the 19th annual conference on Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems (ADASS).  The conference will be held in Sapporo, Japan at the Renaissance Sapporo Hotel during 4-8 October 2009.

The ADASS conference is held each year at a different hosting astronomical institution. The conference provides a forum for scientists and programmers concerned with algorithms, software and software systems employed in the acquisition, reduction, analysis, and dissemination of astronomical data.  The program includes invited talks, contributed papers, display sessions, tutorials, and computer demonstrations, as well as special interest (”Birds of a Feather” or BOF) meetings.  These activities aim to encourage communication between software specialists, scientists, and also to stimulate further development of astronomical software and systems.  Participate in this exciting conference by submitting an oral or poster abstract, a demonstration, or a BoF proposal.

Key topics for this year’s conference include but are not limited to:

• Time domain astronomy
• “Most dangerous” process, design & implementation errors
• The Virtual Observatory
• Reusable archive technologies
• Commonly available development environments & tools

As this is the first ADASS in Asia, proposals that deal with topics of special interest to Asia are encouraged.

Details on the submission process can be found on the Conference website at http://www.adass.org/.

Important Dates:

• Deadline for Financial Aid Applications: July 1, 2009
• Deadline for Oral and Poster Abstract Submission: July 15, 2009
• Deadline for Demo Submission: July 15, 2009
• End of Early (discounted) Registration: July 31, 2009
• Deadline for BoF Submission: August 31, 2009

The Conference website will be updated regularly during the next few months to include information about the program, the current list of attendees, and the submitted abstracts.

http://adass2009.jp/

Second International Workshop on Practical Semantic Astronomy
2-5 March 2009
Glasgow, UK.

Semantic astronomy promises to expand the scientific discovery potential of exponentially growing data collections by enabling natural language querying, content-based searching, rich metadata markup and retrieval, rapid integration of diverse data collections, and machine-assisted scientific discovery.

Practical Semantic Astronomy 2009 is the second in a series of workshops first held at Caltech in February 2008.  The workshop brings together experts from a broad range of disciplines using semantic technologies, alongside practitioners experimenting with these techniques to address current problems in astroinformatics. Read the rest of this entry