This talk is about 10 essential questions everyone —independent from their disciplinary backgrounds— would benefit asking themselves if they produce visual displays (plots, charts, maps, scientific visualizations). The project is the brainchild of Alyssa Goodman & Arzu Çöltekin, and the framework is published...

Update:  So many of you are interested in this tutorial that we've decided to start early (at 9:30), and end later (at 11:30), with a plan as below.  Note, though, that if you can still only come for the 10-11 hour, that should work fine. 

• 9:30-10:   introductory session for people who have never used glue & need to know the bascis, and/or install glue
• 10-11: overview of glue functionality, with (at c. 10:45) an introduction to customizing glue and writing plug ins...

Visualization techniques, often including interactive methods, enable a viewer to gain an understanding of the key features within a set of data in order to facilitate decisions to be made and actions to be taken. As a process...

Abstract: Astronomy has always been a science of catalogs: catalogs of stars, galaxies, quasars, and planets. While most of the light in the Universe comes from these dense objects in the darkness, the contents of the universe are largely diffuse. Dark energy, dark matter, plasma, and gas make up 99.8% of the mass-energy budget of the Universe and cannot be easily cataloged. If we want to understand how the objects in the universe came to be, we must appeal to the largely invisible diffuse phase that formed them. I will try to make sense of this conundrum in three ways. The first is to use...

Abstract: Big data, data-intensive science, and eScience are contemporary terms to describe research fields that generate, manipulate, and manage large volumes of data. Astronomy was among the first data-intensive fields, hence many other domains wish to learn from the experience of astronomers. Their knowledge infrastructure – an ecology of people, practices, technologies, institutions, material objects, and relationships – has accumulated over millennia. Over the last several decades, the practice of astronomy has transitioned...

Abstract:  The tools we use to investigate data affect the way that we do science -- we are constantly (if subtly) drawn towards questions that are easily answered by our analytical and software tools, and comparatively discouraged from research directions that are less-well matched to these tools. A crucial skill that most scientists learn early in their careers is how to identify the most fruitful scientific questions, given the current state of analysis techniques. However, some of us are drawn to to the problem...

Abstract: Visualizations help us in interpreting and communicating complex concepts and rich data. However, we have a number of perceptual and cognitive limitations that counter-intuitively work against us when we work with visualizations. These limitations lead to critical mistakes, e.g., in interpreting patterns or simply reading information from a graphic. What are these culprits and how can we avoid them? This talk by ...

In this talk, Vicent Peris will review his works in the astrophotography and image processing disciplines. Working as astrophotographer at the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Valencia, he leads an astrophotography project at Calar Alto Observatory in southern Spain. This is the first astrophotography project in the world with access to the observational time of professional telescopes (about 50 night per year...