BigSkyEarth COST Action organizes its second workshop, with the topic “Big Data processing and management concepts for new platforms“, in Sopron, Hungary, on February 23-24, 2017. The workshop participants will discuss the future of Big Data platforms in Earth Observations and astronomy, suggest how to expand their work into larger collaborations and seek potential research partners among the workshop participants (if you wonder, here is why your company should join BigSkyEarth)

Workshop Description

If we look at future space-borne or airborne experiments with high data rates to be launched within the next five to ten years, what kind of modern data management and data analysis environment do we need or expect?

• Data Processing and Analysis: What technical progress can we expect within the next 10 years? What are and will be typical overall concepts combining data processing, databases, visualization, quantitative data analysis, and data understanding? What will be the expected progress in the processing and analysis of distributed big data, existing and future functionalities, scalable algorithms, code splitting, load balancing, routine and interactive processing, access to dedicated external databases and models, overall data analysis concepts, and user interfaces? What will be our tools and what do we need in terms of data volumes, data transfer rates, and data management?
• Databases: What technical progress can we expect within the next 10 years? What are and will be typical performance characteristics? What is the expected progress in real time data ingestion, storage capacity, data organisation and handling, data rates, querying and analysis tools? How can we efficiently store, administer and handle instrument data together with external supplementary information, and higher level data content descriptors? Shall we expect distributed and/or embedded architectures and scalable configurations, fast interfaces to interactive visualization, and concurrent operations with data ingestion?
• Visualization: What technical progress can we expect within the next 10 years? What are and will be typical performance characteristics? What will be the expected progress in access to big data, data rates, data management and dimensionality reduction, role within general data analysis concepts, orchestration of tasks, and user interfaces? How can we efficiently select, group, classify, compare, analyse, display data and data descriptors, and store selected results? Shall we expect universal or dedicated visualization concepts? What will be the role of Virtual&Augmented Reality in visual analytics?
• Education: What changes can we expect within the next 10 years? Shall we expect more general or more task-oriented education? What educational support tools do we need that have to be developed? What feed-back tools do we need? Can everything be solved by Data Science?

Register and/or submit your abstracts and/or promote your idea for collaboration: HERE
(see our Book of Abstracts from the workshop in Brno HERE: Research Matchmaking: Building Bridges Between Disciplines)

BigSkyEarth will provide travel and accommodation reimbursements to a limited number of workshop participants. Below you can find a form where you can register for the workshop and apply for the reimbursements. The final number of participants selected for reimbursement will be based on the available budget.

Updates on the workshop preparation are distributed to BigSkyEarth members – if you are not a member, follow instructions for registration in “Become a Member” section (see the right column on this page).

Workshop Venue

The workshop will take place at Hotel Pannonia in Sopron. The hotel is located downtown, just opposite the medieval and renaissance parts of the town, inside the ruined fortress walls. The conference room, the restaurant, and some wellness facilities are inside the hotel

Accommodation

We have a block reservation for 30 rooms at the hotel, available until 23 January at a very favorable price for approximately 70 EUR per day with taxes, including accommodation, breakfast, lunch, and coffee breaks (without dinner). Please confirm your participation by 23 January in an email to the sales manager to [email protected]. Of  course, you can ask for a longer stay if you want.

Travel Information

Sopron is very close to the Wien/Schwechat International Airport (the hotel is 68 km away), and you are strongly recommended to arrive to Schwechat airport, NOT Budapest. Regular and frequent ÖBB trains travel to Sopron (toward the final station of Deutschkreutz) from Vienna.

If you arrive by car, you can take the highways in Austria, and from the direction of Croatia and Slovenia, the roads suggested by google maps. There is no border control currently, but may be some Austrian policemen will take a quick look at your ID when entering Austria from the direction of Hungary.

The parking inside the hotel is available at additional (approx.) 11 EUR per day.

Public Transport in Sopron

Everything is within walking distance from the hotel, so you do not need public transportation.

Local Organizing Committee

Gyula Szabo: szgy at gothard.hu

Register and submit your abstracts

You can register here and promote your collaboration idea/project by submitting your abstracts (including calls for collaboration) and apply for a reimbursement grant covering travel and accommodation expenses. Selected candidates will have to give a short (10-15min) presentation (There will be special considerations with respect to supporting COST policies on promoting gender balance, enabling Early Career Investigators and broadening geographical inclusiveness):

CLICK HERE FOR REGISTRATION & ABSTRACT SUBMISSION FORM

NOTE: reimbursements are possible only to participants coming from institutions in BigSkyEarth member countries: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, fYR Macedonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Lithuania, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Spain, United Kingdom. Members of the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory from Armenia are also eligible for grants.

Program

Thursday 23.04.2017

8:30 – 9:00	Registration
9:00 – 9:15	Opening (Vinković)
9:15 – 10:00	Gottfried Schwarz Future Functionalities for Earth Observation Image Analysis: Realistic Versus Unrealistic Goals
10:00 – 10:45	Peter Baumann Datacubes as a Modern Spatio-Temporal Service Paradigm
10:45 – 11:15	COFFEE BREAK
11:15 – 11:30	Mariangela Liuzzi The Advent of Machine Learning & Remote Sensing Methods in Earthquake Risk Management: pre-event vulnerability assessment and near-real time damage mapping.
11:30 – 11:45	Ognyan Kounchev 1. Satellite based Integrated Systems for Applications in Civil Security  2. Application of Multiscale methods in Network Analysis of Big Data
11:45 – 12:00	Jovan Bajčetić Broadband radio spectrum analysis created on continuous measurements – detection of natural made disturbances and pattern finding
12:00 – 12:15	Dimitrios Marmanis Looking into the Future of Unsupervised Machine Learning Algorithms using Generative Adversarial Networks
12:15 – 12:30	Srđan Mitrović Inter-team education benefits for Big Data signal processing
12:30 – 12:45	Blagoj Delipetrev & Mirjana Kocaleva Proposal for collaborative projects
12:45 – 14:15	LUNCH
14:15 – 15:00	Marco Quartulli Big data analytics architectural standardization efforts
15:00 – 15:15	Szabolcs Mészáros Determining the Atmospheric Parameters and Chemical Composition of Stars in the Age of High Resolution Spectroscopic Sky Surveys
15:15 – 15:30	Peter Butka Architectures for Big Data processing
15:30 – 15:45	Veljko Vujcic Solution patterns for recognition of transient astronomical events
15:45 – 16:15	COFFEE BREAK
16:15 – 16:30	Uroš Kostić Using GPUs for GBSAR data processing
16:30 – 16:45	Alexandru-Cosmin Grivei Data Analytics for Spatio-Temporal Patterns in Satellite Image Time Series: Methods and Architectures
16:45 – 17:00	Bojan Pečnik Persistent Aerial Positioning as a Service: a remote sensing service of the future
17:00 – 17:15	Dejan Vinković The breakthrough remote sensing services possible with stationary or slowly moving airship platforms
17:15 – 17:45	Discussion

Friday 24.02.2017

9:15 – 10:00	Giuseppe Lugano The ERAdiate project: fostering interdisciplinary research and innovation in Intelligent Transport Systems at the University of Žilina
10:00 – 10:45	Engelbert Mephu Nguifo Big Graph Mining: Frameworks and Techniques
10:45 – 11:15	COFFEE BREAK
11:15 – 11:30	Areg Mickaelian Fine analysis of emission line spectra of active galaxies
11:30 – 11:45	Vladimir A. Sreckovic MolD a Database and a Web Service within the SerVO and the VAMDC
11:45 – 12:00	Maria Gritsevich 1. Observing and modelling meteors in planetary atmospheres 2. Scattering and absorption of electromagnetic waves in particulate media
12:00 – 12:15	Gyula M. Szabó Cosmic Risks and Hazards
12:15 – 12:30	Petr Skoda How to Make Big Data from Small Astronomical Files
12:30 – 12:45	Darko Jevremovic Alertsim – update on new developements
12:45 – 14:15	LUNCH
14:15 – 14:30	Martin Vo Classifying of star objects and searching in astronomical databases by using LightCurvesClassifier
14:30 – 14:45	Aleksandra Nina Big databases in ELF/VLF/LF waves monitoring and data processing
14:45 – 15:00	Atanas Hristov Improved programmability for extra large scale systems
15:00 – 15:15	Andrea Manieri Data Science Skills for EO Research and Industry
15:15 – 15:30	Jean-Paul Smets Earth observation appstore
15:30 – 16:00	COFFEE BREAK
16:00 – 17:30	Discussion
17:30 – 17:45	Closing

What is BigSkyEarth?

With the current emergence of Terabyte(TB)-scale astronomical and Earth observation systems, the traditional approach to basic functions such as data searching, analytics or visualization are becoming increasingly difficult to handle. Simple database queries can result now in data subsets so large that they are incomprehensible, slow (or even impossible) to handle, and impossible to visualize with commodity visualization tools. Astronomy and remote sensing complement each other, as they are on the quest for new Big Data interpretation capabilities: both disciplines have peculiar data, typical data processing and analysis chains, and specific models to be fed with data. However, both disciplines lack the capabilities for easily accessible semantics-oriented browsing (usage of higher level descriptive expressions) in large data archives. Therefore, joint efforts to design and develop innovative Big Data tools should help users in many different fields and set new standards for many communities. This has identified several broad challenges to this line of reasoning that need multidisciplinary approach through international networking of experts and professionals. These challenges are then channelled into Action Objectives:
Challenge A: Digital curation and data access
Challenge B: New frontiers in visualization
Challenge C: Adaptation to new high performance computing (HPC) technologies
Challenge D: New generation of scientists in the age of interdisciplinarity
For more detail see the description of the Action in Memorandum of Understanding.