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Link to Keynote Version (82 MB)

Q & A:

• Q: Laura Watkins: The symposium is 3.5 days while the workshops are normally 2.5 days, and the week is only 5 days, so does running both together detract from both the symposium and the workshop? + Joel Green: Is the plan 3.5 days + 2.5 days = 6 or ?
  
  
  • A: No, I don't believe so. There's clear intersection and overlap between the symposium (defines the science goals) and the workshop (start to build infrastructure and connect a disparate, patchwork ecosystem together to achieve those science goals). I feel it's beneficial to hold both back-to-back as this really connects the scientific questions with how the science can practically be accomplished with the terabyte-scale streams of alerts that we are now getting from projects like ZTF. This has not historically been the case in the transient community, and as a result, some of the standards and APIs developed in this field are often disconnected from the science needs, as well as scientists who have questions that they are keen to answer, but are unaware of the resources available, or need relatively simple extensions to existing infrastructure. I believe that running the workshop with the symposium will help address these disconnects.
    
    I'll also note that the symposium organizers have always been aware of the plan to run a workshop right after it, and the agenda was designed accordingly. The 3.5 symposium agenda always included a last half-day discussion on future plans and infrastructure needs. The 2 day workshop turns that 1/2 day discussion into two hack-days with short presentations, and an emphasis on building infrastructure. A subset of the LOC is common between the symposium to make the transition smooth, and we expect that some of the participants in the workshop will also be here for the symposium. As such, the delineation between the two is artificial, and we expect productive discussions and infrastructure work to begin informally during the symposium itself. The two were designed to complement each other, and bring together people who work in the same field but have very different expertise and do not talk to each other nearly enough. This back-back scheduling also reduces the logistical burden on STScI staff while neatly still leaving three slots for other workshops (i.e. you can vote for it, and it still doesn't cost any of the other excellent proposals! ).
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Constraining Structure in the Low Density Universe

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