Ashley Villar, Assistant Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University Faculty of Arts & Sciences, was recently awarded funding through the Harvard Data Science Initiative (HDSI) Faculty Special Projects Fund for her pioneering proposal focusing on anomaly detection in time-domain astrophysics.
Starting in 2025, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will lead a ten-year campaign to image the Southern Sky to unprecedented depth. In 2018, the Photometric LSST Astronomical Time-Series Classification Challenge (PLAsTiCC) was created to spur the development of classification algorithms for Rubin’s events. HDSI funding will support a three-day workshop at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics in February 2024 designed to explore cutting-edge anomaly detection techniques using data from the forthcoming Observatory. Using the same software infrastructure as the original PLAsTiCC challenge, Villar’s research group is leading an effort to simulate the rarest transient phenomena found with Rubin and to push the boundaries of anomaly detection in celestial observations.
With the generous funding from the HDSI, this workshop will foster an inclusive environment by supporting travel expenses for participants, ensuring diverse representation and the engagement of early-career researchers. The funding of Villar’s proposal underscores the significance of her current research in advancing our comprehension of transient celestial phenomena. The resulting dataset from this initiative will serve as a benchmark for anomaly detection in time-domain astrophysics, fueling future groundbreaking discoveries.