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Summer School in Astroinformatics II

Penn State’s Center for Astrostatistics is offering its 2nd Summer School in Astroinformatics (June 13-17, 2022).

The School offers advanced lessons on applying data-driven models to address challenges of modern astronomy research, such as incorporating machine learning, mining large astronomical surveys, harnessing parallel computing architectures, Bayesian computation, and integrating these with domain-specific knowledge to achieve more than can be done with either traditional methods or machine learning individually.  

Lectures will be presented by experienced instructors in astroinformatics. Lab tutorials in the form of computational notebooks will reinforce the learning experience, encouraging  participants to exercise the methods with astronomical datasets illustrating realistic challenges faced in contemporary research.  Lectures and tutorials will be enhanced via virtual interactions among instructors, teaching assistants, and participants, including Zoom Q&A sessions followed by lectures and Slack channels to address additional questions and to support students working through lab tutorials.     

Live content will be delivered during 10am-4pm EDT (UTC-4 hours).  Live lectures and Q&As will be recorded and made available to participants to accommodate participants in different time zones.  Slack channels will be active before and after live content thanks to participation from around the globe.

Intended Audience & Preparation

The School is designed for graduate students and postdocs in Astronomy & Astrophysics.  Advanced undergraduate students and more senior researchers are also welcome to join.  The School assumes a working familiarity of statistics, such as is provided by the first week’s program (Summer School in Statistics for Astronomers).  Students who completed the Summer School in Statistics for Astronomers in a previous year or during the previous week this year are encouraged to participate in the Astroinformatics Summer School.  

The School assumes that participants have basic familiarity with programming, but does not assume that students are familiar with the syntax of any particular language.  The  School will make use of the open-source languages Julia and Python, widely used among the machine learning and scientific machine learning communities.  For this week, students will be provided access to a cloud computing environment including Jupyter and Pluto notebook servers, and all the datasets needed to complete the tutorials.  

Serious participants should expect to engage for full-days during the week.  In addition to live lessons, we recommend budgeting ~2 hours per day for working through the computational notebook tutorials and for consulting with instructors, teaching assistants & other participants on Slack.  Depending on a student’s time zone and other commitments, students may choose to work on lab tutorials in the afternoon/evening after the live lessons or the morning before the next set of lessons.  While this may be a greater expectation than is common for many online meetings, previous years’ experience teaches us that applying lessons learned in lab tutorials is extremely valuable for participants to gain intuition for methods and improve their data analysis skills.

Registration Information

Registration Deadline: June 1st, 2022
Registration Fee: $100

Shortly after the registration is submitted, a receipt will be sent to the email address given on the registration form. Invoices are available upon request.

Registration

Course Information

Live lessons will occur between 10am EDT and end at 4pm EDT (UTC – 4 hours).

Presentations will be recorded, and will be accessible to participants for two months.

A tentative 2022 program is available from the link below.  We are working to make significant updates to the curriculum, including more time for interactive tutorials using astronomical examples.  For 2022, most lessons will be led by researchers active in astrostatistics and/or astroinformatics research.  

Refunds and Cancellations:
Refunds will be issued for cancellation by the registrant if we receive your notification in writing by May 15, 2022.

A $50 administrative fee will be charged for all cancellations. Refund requests made after that time will not be honored.

The University may cancel or postpone any course or activity because of insufficient enrollment or other unforeseen circumstances. If a program is canceled or postponed, the University will refund the full registration fees but cannot be held responsible for any other related costs, charges, or expenses.