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Google Summer of Code 2009 Application
pyastrolib is a project led by a group of astronomers, primarily at the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto. The purpose of pyastrolib is to provide professional astronomers a robust set of tools for astronomical data analysis.
Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2009? What do you hope to gain by participating?
Research astronomy has long been at the cutting edge of computing, especially when it comes to theoretical simulations of astrophysical phenomena. Despite this, the data reduction and analysis tools have significantly lagged the theoretical side, and as such, the most common data analysis tools in astronomy are generally inefficient, opaque, and largely archaic. Further, research astronomy has lagged behind much of the data analysis community by its slow adoption of python and the robust set of modules available for it, largely due to the inertia of the commercial data analysis language, IDL.
By participating in GSoC 2009, our intentions are two-fold: develop an open-source cross-platform facility to enable astronomers to benefit directly from modern numerical methods, as well as introduce young computer scientists to the problems of real scientific analysis. We see a number of possible synergies through the networking of GSoC students with the astronomical community, not limited to networking, direct access to modern research in astronomy, as well as a fresh outlook on the methods of data analysis.
Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation.
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If your organization has not previously participated in GSoC, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?
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The project (and all produced code) is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License
We are using a google group: http://groups.google.com/group/pyastrolib/
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Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now.
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- Mike Gorelick
- Serguei Ossokine
- Mubdi Rahman (gid: mubdirahman)
- Rene Breton (gid: superluminique)
- Mike Gorelick (gid: mynameisfiber)
- Serguei Ossokine (gid: physicsmagic87)
What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible.
Our mentors have been selected based on their familiarity in the astronomical community and/or familiarity with open source programming:
M. Rahman is an active researcher in the astronomical community, as a graduate student in the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto. He has been extensively involved in astronomical computing at all levels, from data reduction to theoretical computing, and as such, is familiar with the current availability of tools in the community and how best they are used. Further, he was the co-chair of the recent successful Workshop on Parallel Computing in Astrophysics, held in July 2008.
R. Breton is an active researcher in the astronomical community. He received his Ph.D. in astrophysics at McGill University and is now a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto. His main research interests are pulsars, binary systems and statistics applied to astrophysics. He has extensive familiarity with the use of python for astronomical data reduction and analysis. In particular, he developed an expertise with multi-dimensional data modeling with the use of python. He has experience with project management and organized the Student Workshop for the “Centre de Recherche en Astrophysique du Quebec” in 2006.
M. Gorelick has extensive open source development experience, including participating in such projects as musicbrainz, kismet and the linux kernel. He has a great deal of experience with Python, and is familiar with the astronomical community as an undergraduate student in astronomy.
S. Ossokine is an undergraduate student in astronomy with extensive scientific computing experience, including using python with scipy for data analysis.
We intend to keep students engaged with the astronomical community at large by introducing them to cutting edge astronomical research and how the tools they develop will be used by the international community. In addition, we intend to further engage the student(s) by having them actively be authors in the peer-reviewed academic paper we intend to publish immediately after the first stage of this project.
All of our mentors are active members of the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto and are engaging in this project as an active element of their research, and as such, disappearing mentors will not be a significant problem.
What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project’s community before, during and after the program?
If geographically feasable, we intend to invite the student(s) to the annual meeting of the Canadian Astronomical Society to interact with the astronomical community as a whole and to understand the needs of modern research. During and after the program, we intend to have the students be active participants in a peer-reviewed academic paper we intend to publish regarding this project, thus students will be co-authors on an academic paper.
Once again, we intend to have students that stick around to actively be a part of the development community, and be co-authors on the first (or possibly many) academic paper(s), which will have a significant impact on the academic careers of these students.