ADASS XVI BoF proposal

[Rob Seaman]

Hola,

Have attached the proposal for the "Autonomous BoF" at ADASS XVI  
(www.adass.org).  This can be regarded as a followup to last year's  
VOEvent BoF, as well as a predecessor to next year's combined VOEvent  
III / HTN III workshop.  Appropriate <Citations> have been left as an  
exercise for the motivated student.

Please note that voevent.org is now an alias for the IVOA WG page.   
Now, if I could only remember my password to the twiki...

Rob

Begin forwarded message:

> The Emerging Infrastructure of Autonomous Astronomy
>
> Rob Seaman, (NOAO/VOEventNet), seaman at noao.edu
> Tim Axelrod, (Large Synoptic Survey Telescope), taxelrod at lsst.org
> Alasdair Allan, (Exeter/eSTAR), aa at astro.ex.ac.uk
> Robert White, (LANL/Thinking Telescopes Project), rwhite at lanl.gov
> Roy WIlliams, (Caltech/VOEventNet), roy at cacr.caltech.edu
>
> The transient celestial events that nightly mystified our paleo- 
> ancestors, transfix us yet today.  Over the past few decades, our  
> understanding of celestial objects has been enriched by numerous  
> surveys of the static sky.  Future advances in our understanding of  
> cosmic processes demand that we approach the ancient study of  
> transient celestial events with the rich statistical techniques  
> learned while cataloging less mercurial phenomena.  Given the  
> serendipitous nature of transient astronomy, constructing  
> scientifically useful sample data sets will also require surveys,  
> such as proposed by LSST, on a vastly larger scale than have ever  
> been attempted.
>
> Meeting these challenges demands a new logistical framework for  
> carrying out the practice of astronomy.  Manual observing  
> techniques not only will fail to serve, but do not even begin to  
> address the complete problem of defining a new autonomous  
> infrastructure that closes the loop from proposing new research –  
> through experimental design – to the scheduling of survey telescope  
> operations – to the data archiving and pipeline processing that  
> result in the discovery of new transients – to the publishing of  
> these events – through automated follow-up via robotic assets – and  
> finally to the collection, display and interpretation of all  
> related observations, resulting in adjustments to the original  
> research directions.
>
> Work in all of these areas is ongoing.  Diverse groups are  
> collaborating on a common interface architecture.  For example, the  
> IVOA VOEvent working group is leading the effort to characterize  
> and publish sky transient alerts.  The Heterogeneous Telescope  
> Networks (HTN) is relying on the VOEvent standard to achieve its  
> own goals.  HTN is a confederation of observatories and robotic  
> telescope projects seeking interoperability between the emerging  
> robotic telescope networks, with a long term goal of creating an e- 
> market for the exchange of telescope time.  Two projects relying on  
> VOEvent and HTN are eSTAR and TALONS.  The eSTAR project uses an  
> intelligent agent architecture to provide autonomous decision  
> making, permitting its users to schedule observations over a  peer- 
> to-peer network of geographically distributed telescopes.  TALONS,  
> the Telescope Alert Operations Network System, intelligently  
> interconnects heterogeneous astronomical resources within the  
> Thinking Telescope Project, allowing the RAPTOR telescopes to  
> function in full closed-loop autonomous operations, monitoring the  
> sky and performing follow up operations.  Some pertinent links:
>
> 	• <a href="http://www.lsst.org/lsst_home.shtml">Large Synoptic  
> Survey Telescope</a>
> 	• <a href="http://www.telescope-networks.org">Heterogeneous  
> Telescope Networks consortium</a>
> 	• <a href="http://www.estar.org.uk">eSTAR</a>
> 	• <a href="http://www.thinkingtelescopes.lanl.gov">Thinking  
> Telescopes Project</a>
> 	• <a href="http://voevent.org">IVOA VOEvent working group</a>
> 	• <a href="http://voeventnet.org">VOEventNet consortium</a>
>
> The organizers plan to:  discuss LSST planning and developments,  
> hear reports from the recent HTN workshop in Germany, discuss the  
> activities of the HTN consortium and of the IVOA VOEvent working  
> group, the operation of the emerging distributed autonomous  
> backbone network known as VOEventNet, and the broader implications  
> of various Virtual Observatory initiatives.
>
> Representatives of other projects exploring autonomous techniques
> are encouraged to contribute presentations to the BoF
> and their expertise to the working groups.

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