Report from the third edition of the Training School

The Training School gathered 33 attendees from 17 countries all over Europe for hands-on training on GPU-centric data analytics. The attendants at all levels from both research and industrial backgrounds have once again been the crucial factor in the success of the School.

Since the identified challenges are similar in astronomy and Earth Observation, with signal processing, statistics, machine learning, and computer science as the common denominator, the Training School has aimed at boosting the communication within and between disciplines and applications areas, by propagating and advancing relevant common solutions developed within academic, applied research and industrial environments.

The goal has been to share valuable know-how encompassing machine learning, large scale simulation, scalable visualization and specific efforts in science and technology.

The key aspect has been to address all these topics in synergy, setting them up in a logical interdisciplinary framework bridging the diverse areas addressed by the school.

The participants were selected for the school based on the quality and relevance of the research project descriptions provided as part of their application procedures. Their backgrounds ranged from astronomy — around 50% — to remote sensing — 30% — and computer science 20%. The institutions they work for go from observatories to startup companies. About 20% were women, again from both astronomical and Earth observation backgrounds.

Lessons were given on topics ranging from scalable machine learning algorithms to GPU code optimization and visualization.

Speakers included Egon Pavlica (University of Nova Gorica, SL), Marc Masana (Universidad Autonomica de Barcelona, ES), Tibor Korzjak from Hipersfera (Hipersfera, HR), Esteban Garcia (Universidad Europea de Madrid, ES), Simon Grimm (University of Bern, CH), Antonio Falcao (Uninova, PT) and Javad Zabakhsh (Carinthia University of Applied Sciences, AT), Andoni Beristain, Nerea Aranjuelo, Marco Quartulli and Ramon Moreno (Vicomtech, ES).

The material for the course — presentations and hands-on work notebooks by the speakers and the material being produced by the participant groups — is in the process of being published online.

The XXX Canary Islands Winter School of Astrophysics

The XXX Canary Islands Winter School of Astrophysics, organized by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), focusses on Big Data Analysis in Astronomy. The School, to be held in San Cristobal de La Laguna (Tenerife, Spain) from 4 to 10 November 2018, will admit around 60-70 PhD students and young Post-Docs.