29th Annual Report (2016-17)

134 In December 2016, the TCS team successfully completed this phase with the delivery of (i) design of the Hardware Control Daemon (HCD) that interfaces between the TCS and the Mount Control System (MCS) of the telescope, (ii) MCS simulator, (iii) design document for the interface between TCS and the telescope enclosure, and (iv) a detailed plan for all the subsequent project phases. The interface with the telescope enclosure was developed in collaborationwith the engineers from the Canada-TMT team. The successful completion of this phase is a crucial milestone towards delivering the full preliminary design of the TCS, which is arguably the most complex software system of the telescope. The full preliminary design phase (duration ~ 2 years) will start in May 2017. Astronomy is not the only discipline which is affected by the present data deluge. Big data, characterized by its high volume and its speed of generation is a problem that affects several other disciplines of science, such as climate, genomics, proteomics, etc. Handling these huge volumes of data is an important problem that needs to be addressed with haste. Experts in each domain, including those in the industry have been making individual efforts to address these problems. It would be particularly beneficial if experts from multiple disciplines, especially those related to scientific research, work together on these problems. With this inmind, the National Knowledge Network (NKN) has funded a three year joint data management andmining project, to be led byAjit Kembhavi and Dinakar Salunkhe (formerly the Director at the Regional Centre of Biotechnology, Faridabad, and at present, the Director at International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, Delhi). The key aims of these project include creation of data services for various data sets in domains ofAstronomy and Biology, as well as to research data mining and management techniques for handling big data. It is hoped that techniques currently applied to specific domains will benefit experts in other domains as well. Amajor project is already underway exploring best solutions for handling detailed metadata and versioning for the data produced at the AstroSat CZTI Payload Operations Centre located in IUCAA. AVirtual Observatory compliant service for 8+ billion image cut-outs obtained from the CRTS and served from IUCAA, has also been implemented. Planning is underway for projects exploring the application of astronomical image processing techniques in the domain of X-ray Diffraction Crystallography and Advanced Machine Learning techniques in the field ofMass Spectrometry of Proteins. DataDriven Initiatives inAstronomy and Biology