About a hundred experts in astronomy, information technology, and applied computer science have gathered at Caltech to define a new field at the intersection of these disciplines. The emerging field of astroinformatics reflects how science is changing in the 21st century, powered by the information-technology revolution.
The Thirty Meter Telescope is co-sponsoring and Caltech is hosting the first international conference on this subject, AstroInformatics2010. The goals of the meeting are to help define this new field of research and to chart its future development.
"All sciences are being transformed profoundly by the information-technology revolution, and astronomy is no exception," says S. George Djorgovski, professor of astronomy at Caltech and one of the organizers of the conference. "There is a great synergy here: technology is based on science and is stimulated by its challenges, and in turn it enables a new and better science."
"Astronomy has become an enormously data-rich science, but extracting knowledge from the exponentially growing flood of data is not easy," says another of the organizers, Professor Giuseppe Longo of Italy's University of Naples Federico II. "We need some new tools to fully explore these massive and complex data sets."
In order to reach and engage a wider audience, the entire conference will be available to the public via webcast.