Hack Day 2015 at  AAS 225 in Seattle Washington

When: Thursday, Jan 8 2015 10:00 AM - 7:00 PM

Where: 4C-2 (Convention Center)

 

We are asking and expecting all Hack Day participants to plan on staying for most of the day.

 

Registration is encouraged to facilitate pre-meeting coordination, but if you didn't register you're still more than welcome to participate in the Hack Day.

 

What is a hack day?

We are going to get together to write code or work on some other project, fast. The idea is to design a do-able project and fully execute it in one day. Or at least go down trying. Come with a project, or come with deployable skills, ready to deploy.

Examples of hacks from DotAstro conferences: DotAstro 6 Hack Day Summary,  DotAstro 2012 Hacks, .Astro 4 unconference proceedings

Examples of hacks from years past:  astro4astro,  Summary of AAS 223 Hack Day,  last year's AAS Hack Day project pitch page, Astrotweeps, Fund me Maybe? video, Astrobetter airline guide, Summary of AAS 221 Hack Day,

Project ideas

• Python Time-domain toolkit. I have various code snippets at astroML, at multiband_LS, and supersmoother. It would be nice to have one solid reference package for these types of common time-domain functionalities, perhaps wrapped-up within astroML (Jake VanderPlas)
• Preliminary analysis of gender survey data from speakers/questioners. See here for details on the study. (Davenport)
• I want to learn how to work w/ HEALPix data in Python. Simple idea: Cross correlate WISE, Pan-STARRS1, Planck, and SFD dust maps (2D) to look for moving/foreground residuals in dust structure (Davenport)
• Add new cadence metrics to the LSST Metrics framework (Bellm)
• Reinventing the wheel: build a simple, configurable db+web interface for organizing ad-hoc directories of FITS data (Bellm)
• A Web-API and front-end to Astropy: build a Flask front-end to core functionality in Astropy to support, e.g., unit conversion, coordinate conversion (Galactic to ICRS, etc.), time conversion (MJD to ISO, etc.), and more. I've made a fairly simple back-end here (example) that returns JSON, so now we can start building front-end pages for parsing tables of values and etc. (Adrian P-W & Erik Tollerud)
• Why do people ask or don't  ask questions at conferences? - survey poll to look at motivations  (Colette  Salyk, Meg Schwamb)

Participant skills and interests

• Kelle Cruz (Hunter College & AMNH): information sharing
• David W. Hogg (NYU): Python, SDSS data, Kepler data, probabilistic inference
• Meg Schwamb (ASIAA):  Python,IDL, citizen science, astrotweeps, Astronomy on Tap
• James Davenport (UW): IDL, Python, blogging, data visualization, time series studies of stars and galactic structure
• Eric Bellm (Caltech): Python, machine learning, time domain analysis, bibliometrics
• Adrian Price-Whelan (Columbia): Python, inference, dynamics, Astropy
• Aaron Meisner (Harvard): Python, IDL, interstellar dust, web scraping, image processing
• Alex Hagen (Penn State): Python, SED fitting, MCMC things, statistics

Twitter Lists and Hashtags

We're using #hackAAS tag for all tweets related to the Hack Day