Hot-wiring the Transient Universe: final announcement

[Rob Seaman]

Hot-wiring the Transient Universe: A Joint VOEvent & HTN Workshop
June 4-7 2007 • University of Arizona, Tucson
Final Call for Registration (Registration closes on the 4th May 2007)



Website

The conference website can be found at http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/ 
hotwired

The Workshop

An interdisciplinary agenda will cover technology, methods and  
experimental design for the detection and rapid follow-up  
observations of celestial transients, as well as data fusion to  
create knowledge about the underlying astronomical phenomena.   
Sessions will include tutorials and demos as well as topical  
presentations and working discussions.  Refereed proceedings will be  
published as an issue of Astronomische Nachrichten.

We anticipate starting with a broad vision of future trends in the  
reporting and follow-up of celestial transient alerts - reaching into  
the era of movie-like modes of observation of the sky (e.g., via  
LSST), of new space missions and giant telescopes, and of the Virtual  
Observatory.  The context will be the emerging national and  
international observing system encompassing multi-wavelength (and non- 
EM) instruments on telescopes of all apertures, both robotic and  
human mediated.  Concrete action items will emerge for both networked  
event reporting and autonomous follow-up.  All aspects of community  
interest in astronomical transient and time domain phenomena will be  
discussed, from experimental design to the scheduling of resources,  
observing modes to technical standards, scientific research programs  
to education and public outreach.

Registration

Registration for the workshop will close on the 4th May, register  
online at:

	http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/hotwired/register/index.cfm

Accommodations

Accommodation at the two conference hotels is available at a reduced  
rate;

Marriott University Park
880 E. 2nd Street
Tucson, AZ 85719 USA
Rate: $109/night + tax and city surcharge
Distance from NOAO: about 0.8 miles

Four Points by Sheraton - Tucson University Plaza
1900 E. Speedway Boulevard
Tucson, AZ 87519 USA
Rate: $59/night + tax & city surcharge
Distance from NOAO: about 0.4 miles

Location

Meinel Optical Sciences Building, Rm 307
University of Arizona, Tucson

Campus map:
	http://iiewww.ccit.arizona.edu/uamap/staticLarge/94.01.html

Tucson map:
	http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=university+of+arizona, 
+tucson&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=54.093296,68.994141&layer=&ie=UTF8&z 
=15&om=1&iwloc=addr

The conference venue is a winner of the prestigious Honor Award of  
the American Institute of Architects:

	http://iraf.noao.edu/~seaman/meinel.pdf

Network

A wireless network will be available in the meeting areas.

Preliminary Program of sessions (pending further contributions)

	QuickStart Guide for Autonomous Astronomy (Chair:  Roy Williams)
		Robert White:  RTML + VOEvent < HTN: A system that is more than the  
sum of its parts
		Roy WIlliams:  How to build and how to read a VOEvent packet  
(TUTORIAL)
		Rick Hessman:  What is RTML?
		Alasdair Allan:  Transport for the HTN and VOEvent networks

	Long range vision for transient astronomy (Chair: George Djorgovski)
		Kem Cook: Science requiring follow-up of large surveys
		Przemek Wozniak:  Thinking Telescope Transients
		Francesco Pierfederici:  The LSST Moving Object Processing System

	Event Classification (Chair Josh Bloom)
		Tom Vestrand:  The Science from Rapid Response:
			Energy input and response from prompt and early optical afterglow  
emission in GRBs (KEYNOTE)
		Andy Becker:  Transient Object Detection and Classification
		Josh Bloom:  Building a Classification Engine for the Palomar  
Transients Finder
		Ashish Mahabal:  On probabilistic determination of type of an object
				based on previously known variable objects

	Web services for real time data reduction and analysis (Chair:  Mike  
Fitzpatrick)
		Alasdair Allan: Your PLASTIC pal, helping you pull VOEvent onto the  
desktop (TUTORIAL)
		Iain Steele:  Data Reduction Services for Heterogenous Telescopes
		Tim Jenness:  ORAC-DR Data Reduction Pipeline

	VOEvent Unbound (Chair:  Rob Seaman)
		Steve Allen:  XML packet authentication
		Rick Hessman:  UCDs vs. ontologies - just a matter of semantics

	Surveys and event publishing
		George Djorgovski:  Some experiences from the Palomar-Quest survey
		David Sand:  A Systematic Search for Supernovae in Low Redshift  
Galaxy Clusters
		Phillip Warner:  Integrating and deploying a VOEvent service at  
your institution (TUTORIAL)

	Space-based and Radio transients
		Steve Howell:  Kepler precursor survey
		Scott Barthelmy:  Gamma-ray Bursts Coordinates Network

	Observatory Operations
		Chris Smith:  Integrating VOEvent into OIR System, an NOAO  
Operations case study
		Kent Honeycutt:  Lessons learned from RoboScope:  a long-term  
automated monitoring program
		Kate Scholberg:  The Supernova Early Warning System
		Alasdair Allan:  Autonomous software, myth or magic?

	Registries and databases:  federation for dummies (Chair:  Matthew  
Graham)
		Elizabeth Auden:  Querying VOEvents through AstroGrid
		Matthew Graham:  Resource Discovery with the VO Registry

	Grid Markets (Chair: Iain Steele)

	Distributed scheduling (Chair:  Alasdair Allan)
		Eric Saunders:  Adaptive distributed scheduling, putting the 'work'  
into network

	HTN infrastructure (Chair:  Robert White)
		Michel Boer:   TAROT: A robotic observatory for gamma-ray bursts  
and other sources
		Neil Clay:  RTML SOAP endpoint implementation on the Liverpool  
Telescope
		TBD:  RTML 3.2: a revised RTML schema for brain-dead software IDEs
		Chris Mottram:  Robonet-1.0

	Wrap-up and action items
		Rob Seaman:  The life cycle of a transient event
		final discussion

Sponsoring Organisations

The workshop was funded from generous contributions from the  
sponsoring organisations;

	National Optical Astronomy Observatory, http://www.noao.edu
	National Virtual Observatory, http://www.us-vo.org
	Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, http://www.lsst.org
	eSTAR Project, http://www.estar.org.uk
	Thinking Telescope Project, http://www.thinkingtelescopes.lanl.gov/

and under the auspices of the IVOA's VOEvent Working Group and the  
HTN Consortium.

	IVOA, http://www.ivoa.net/
	HTN, http://www.telescope-networks.org/

Organizing Committee

Rob Seaman, National Optical Astronomy Observatory
Roy Williams, California Institute of Technology
Alasdair Allan, eSTAR Project, University of Exeter
Robyn Allsman, Large Synoptic Survey Telescope
Scott Barthelmy, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Joshua Bloom, University of California, Berkeley
Mike Fitzpatrick, NOAO
Matthew Graham, California Institute of Technology
Frederic Hessman, MONET Project, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
Iain Steele, eSTAR Project, Liverpool John Moores University
Philip Warner, NOAO
Robert White, Thinking Telescope Project, Los Alamos National Laboratory


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