Overview
The Arizona-NOAO Temporal Analysis and Response to Events System (ANTARES) is a joint project of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Arizona. The goal is to build the software infrastructure necessary to process and filter alerts produced by time-domain surveys, with the ultimate source of such alerts being the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). Such a tool is often called a broker, as it acts as the entity between producers and consumers. ANTARES will add value to alerts by annotating them with information from external sources such as previous surveys from across the electromagnetic spectrum. In addition, the temporal history of annotated alerts will provide further annotation for analysis. These alerts will go through a cascade of filters to select interesting candidates. For the prototype, 'interesting' is defined as the rarest or most unusual alert, but future systems will accommodate multiple filtering goals. The system is designed to be flexible, allowing users to access the stream at multiple points throughout the process, and to insert custom filters where necessary.
Project Web Site
The Arizona-NOAO Temporal Analysis and Response to Events System (ANTARES) project web site is here.
People
Faculty:
John Kececioglu
Carlos Scheidegger
Richard T. Snodgrass
Robert S. Maier (Mathematics, Physics, and Statistics GIDP)
External Collaborators:
Tim Axelrod (LSST)
Tim Jenness (LSST)
Thomas Matheson (NOAO)
Abhijit Saha
(NOAO)
Rob Seaman (NOAO)
Postdocs:
Gautham
Narayan (NOAO)
Monika Soraisam (NOAO)
Graduate Students:
Zhe Wang
Shuo Yang (Chief Programmer)
Previous Graduate Students:
Jennifer Dempsey
Jackson Toeniskoetter
Funding
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Arizona-NOAO Temporal Analysis and Response to Events System (ANTARES)
National Science Foundation, CISE AST-1344024 September 2013 to August 2016 (PI: Richard Snodgrass, Co-PI: John Kececioglu, Abhijit Saha, and Thomas Matheson) |
Publications
Thomas Matheson, Abhijit Saha, Richard T. Snodgrass, John Kececioglu, Gautham Narayan, Robert Seaman, Tim Jennes, and Tim Axelrod, "ANTARES: A Prototype Transient Broker System," Proc. SPIE 9149, Observatory Operations: Strategies, Processes, and Systems V, 914908 (July 28, 2014); abstracted in American Astronomical Meeting Abstracts, 223, #343.02, 2014. (pdf)
Thomas Matheson, Abhijit Saha, Richard T. Snodgrass, and John Kececioglu, "ANTARES: The Arizona-NOAO Temporal Analysis and Response to Events System," in Hot-Wiring the Transient Universe 3, P. Wozniak, M. Graham, and A. Mahabal (eds.), 2014. (pdf)
Abhijit Saha, Zhe Wang, Thomas Matheson, Gautham Narayan, Richard Snodgrass, John Kececioglu, Carlos Scheidegger, Tim Axelrod, Tim Jenness, Stephen Ridgway, Robert Seaman, Clark Taylor, Jackson Toeniskoetter, Eric Welch, Shuo Yang and Tayeb Zaidi, "ANTARES: progress towards building a 'broker' of time-domain alerts," Proc. SPIE 9910, Observatory Operations: Strategies, Processes, and Systems VI, 99100F, July, 2016. (pdf)
ANTARES in News
A graphic story that appeared January 8, 2014 on the NOAO web site shows the development and promise of the ANTARES system
"How to Find the Rarest of the Rare in Southern Skies." article in UANews, December 17, 2013
"Anything you can imagine happening in our vast universe already has", article in the Arizona Daily Star, October 18, 2013
Webmaster: Shuo Yang