Astro Transient Workshop

2020 Astro Transient Workshop

The Astro Transient workshop will showcase tools recently developed by Zooniverse to address the needs of next generation astronomical surveys.  We will demonstrate how these have been deployed for a number of pathfinder projects for transient and variable star astrophysics.  Specifically, the tools developed will improve a citizen scientist’s ability to interact with the data and simplify the extraction of scientific information from Zooniverse.  In addition, we have implemented more efficient allocation of volunteer attention through smart task assignment functionalities enabling faster data processing and the ability to prioritize volunteer effort.  The workshop will also focus on the specific challenges of transient lightcurve classification in the context of LSST.  We will show recent work to benchmark existing approaches and seek to stimulate discussion of new approaches, combining both citizen scientists and machine learning, to tackle the challenges of processing large volumes of sparsely sampled light curves while maintaining the opportunity for serendipitous discoveries and the study of rare transients. Check out the program and register.