Day Zero

.Astronomy 9 will begin with our so-called “Day Zero” on 14 November. The aim of Day Zero is to help you familiarize yourself with the format of the conference, as this may be different from other conferences you’ve attended in the past, and introduce you to some of the concepts, tools and skills that will come up during the conference and in the hack day. The programme consists of introductory talks and tutorials, some of which will be given in parallel to suit everyone’s skill level and interest. You do not need to sign up for the tutorials in advance.

Day Zero is a great opportunity to meet the other participants, learn some new skills, and get ideas for the main days of the conference.

Programme

09:00 – 09:30 Welcome & Intro (organisers)
09:30 – 10:00 Meet & Greet your fellow participants (Chair: Carolina Ödman)
10:00 – 10:30 Introduction to the work of the OAD (Kevin Govender)
10:30 – 11:00 Coffee break
11:00 – 12:30 Parallel sessions 1 (see below)
12:30 – 13:30 LUNCH
13:30 – 14:30 Introduction to the Astropy project (Brigitta Sipocz/Brett Morris/Nick Earl)
14:30 – 15:00 30 minutes to your own Zooniverse citizen science project (Becky Smethurst)
15:00 – 15:30  Coffee break
15:30 – 17:00 Parallel sessions 2 (see below)

Parallel sessions 1 (90 minutes)

Parallel sessions 1 will consist of THREE 45-minute tutorials, repeated twice:

  • Collaborative coding with Github (Demitri Muna)
  • Collaborative writing with Overleaf (Steve Crawford)
  • Intro to Jupyter notebooks (Becky Smethurst)

Parallel sessions 2 (90 minutes)

Parallel sessions 2 will consist of FOUR 45-minute tutorials, repeated twice:

  • Web tools for non-coders (Arna Karick)
  • Introduction to machine learning (Josh Peek/Brian Nord)
  • Visualization for science tips & tricks (Charl Cater)
  • Programming for GPUs (Ben Cook)

Hack Day Stories

During Day Zero we will insert some 5-minute “Hack Day storytelling” sessions around the breaks, where we invite you to share your experiences from previous Hack events, in astronomy or other areas, good or bad. We particularly want to hear about your failed projects, your best and worst hacks. These short sessions will be informal – no slides or demos required.