Marshals and Scanning

Attendance: Leo, Ofer, Rahman, Jan, Uli, Mansi, Joel, Suvi

Initial conversation

• Who takes over marshals?
• Who develops and maintains them?
• How much gets reused from iPTF?
• Desirable for someone with long-term sight to take over marshal.
• Possible to give students and postdocs such a task, but small return for them. Also they come and disappear.
• Advantage of students: they have engagement in day-to-day follow-up and know what tasks need to be automated.
• Marshal as platform maintained by staff, but designed for easily plugging in robots written by grad students and postdocs?
• Automated classification

Main issues for ZTF Marshal

• Scalability
• Needed components
• Separate marshals for different science targets (galactic, extragalactic, TOO, asteroid)? Or all together?
• Who develops and maintains them?
• Infrastructure: databases, computing
• Maximizing uptime: disperse maintenance expertise across time zones
• Code accessible to whole collaboration. Open source?
• Single objects vs. science feeds
• Access control, visibility of proprietary data

Scanning

• iPTF numbers: average 200 candidates per night, average 4 human-hours per day
• Slow down speed of refresh: scanners can check every hour instead of every 15 minutes if robots are reliable
• Things that leak through: bright stars, diffraction spikes
• Active learning
• Go back to citizen science? Mechanical Turk?

Summary

1. Want human monitoring.
2. List of candidates requiring human intervention should remain around 200 per night.
3. NO GENERAL PURPOSE SCANNING TEAM. Should separate scanning for each science group.

Action items

1. Identify developers
2. E-mail list for scanning and marshals for ZTF
3. Regular reports on scanning issues on weekly extragalactic calls
4. Prototype w/ API
5. Understand (human, application) interfaces with IPAC database, alerts, public data, community time

-- LeoSinger - 22 May 2016