Summary of activities January 2017 - March 2017

WP1 - Management

• Organization of GENIUS last plenary meeting together with the Second DPAC Consortium Meeting in Sitges, 23 - 27 January.
• Organization of GENIUS External Advisory Board meeting (March)
• Organization of final meeting in Brussels with Project Officer and External Reviewer (April)

WP2 - User community

• Brown, Yamada, Moitinho, Walton, and Marrese participated in the GENIUS plenary meeting at Sitges (2017-01-25), reporting on the WP2 activities over the duration of the project.
  • Maresse reported in the activities for Task 2.4 over the duration of the project.
  • Yamada reported on the Japanese GENIUS activities.
  • Moitinho summarized the requirements gathering effort on the visualization tasks for the Gaia Archive.
  • Walton summarized the efforts on overall Gaia archive requirements analysis.
• Massari was appointed for the remaining 3 months of the GENIUS personnel funding in Leiden. He has revisited the user requirements collected so far (AB-026) and even accouting for the experience from the use of Gaia DR1 in mind, did not find any missing requirements or the need to add new ones.

WP3 - System design

T3.1 Technical Coordination

• Hambly organised a the sixth Gaia DPAC CU9 WP930 / GENIUS WP3 review meeting (minutes available on the DPAC Wiki here)
• Hambly presented a status update for CU9 WP930, including GENIUS contributions, at the GENIUS / DPAC consortium meeting in Sitges, Jan 23-27 (presentations available here)
• Hambly participated in a final GENIUS wrap-up meeting, presenting the status of WP3, in a splinter session at the GENIUS / Gaia DPAC meeting in Sitges, Jan 25 (presentation available here)
• Hambly met with representatives of ESDC, CU9 WP973 / GENIUS WPs 4 & 7 (validation and data mining) to discuss architectural issues concerning scalability for future Gaia DRs and possible migration from relational DBMS as server-side back-end store to a hardware cluster employing distributed file-store (Hadoop / HDFS), column-oriented storage (Parquet) and associated interface layers (e.g. Spark/SQL)
• Hambly organised and chaired a Gaia DR2 Data Model kick-off telecon, Jan 31st, including representation from GENIUS (minutes available on the DPAC Wiki here)

T3.2 Aspects of archive interface design

• Voutsinas has written up his ADQL autocomplete library (final draft here) and overseen it's deployment in the Gaia archive, working with the ESDC team

T3.3 VO infrastructure

• IVOA Compliance document (D3.3) finalised (available from DPAC SVN here)
• client-side TAP publishing software and associated documentation finalised and available from here (part of deliverables D3.4)

T3.4 Data Centre collaboration

• Test suite (beta and stress testing) documentation finalised (part of deliverables D3.4 - D3.6; available on DPAC SVN here)
• Final testing and documentation of Distributed Query Processing

T3.5 Data mining environments

• Morris has submitted to Astronomy & Computing the paper "Use of Docker for deployment of astronomical software"

WP4 - Data Exploitation

T4.2 - Visualization

T4.3 - Data Mining

• Team attended GENIUS/DPAC plenary meeting 23-27 Jan Sitges, Spain
• New Virtual Image of a 'miniaturized' version of the platform is available for download. It incorporates all GDAF platform features.
• Added new use cases to the Use cases list.
• Participation in a Data Science course hosted by Cloudera. Main focus on Spark and other data science tools in the Big Data era.
• Development of validation test cases as a demonstrator of the platform and the technology for the Validation working group.

T4.4 - VO tools and services

• M. Taylor attend GENIUS/DPAC plenary meeting 23-27 Jan Sitges, Spain

WP5 - Validation

T5.1 - Technical coordination

• Most members attended GENIUS/DPAC plenary meeting 23-27 Jan Sitges, Spain
• Organisation of a plenary meeting devoted to WP5 validation on January 26
• Participation in a final GENIUS wrap-up meeting, presenting the status of WP5, in a splinter meeting in Sitges, Jan 25
• Finalisation of the A&A validation paper
• Preparation of the validation of preliminary DR2 data

T5.2 - Definition of problem cases, validation scenarios and tools

• Development resumed: analysis of photometry, local smoothing of data

T5.3 - Simulation versus reality: from models to observables

T5.4 - Confronting Gaia to external archives

T5.5 - Data demining: outlier analysis

• Development resumed: local smoothing of data

T5.6 - Transversal tools for special objects

WP6 - Support

T6.2-Simulated Catalogue

T6.3-Science Alerts testbed

WP7 - Dissemination

T7.1 - Coordination of dissemination activities

T7.2 - Community portal infrastructure

T7.3 - Community portal, outreach and academic activities

From January-March 2017 Twitter numbers are:

• January: tweets (5), tweet impressions (6,913), profile visits (644), mentions (7), new followers (14), total number of followers in January 2017 (427).
• February: tweets (0), tweet impressions (1,393), profile visits (177), mentions (1), new followers (0), total number of followers in February 2017 (427).
• March: tweets (), tweet impressions (), profile visits (), mentions (), new followers (), total number of followers in March 2017 ().