IUCAA - Khagol # 111 - July 2017

| KHAG L | | No. 111 - JULY 2017 05 Workshop on Data Intensive Science During the last two decades, the role of data in all spheres and disciplines has grown by several orders of magnitude. Thanks to better instruments, easy accessibility to networking and computation methods, data are getting accumulated at an extraordinarily fast rate. This has naturally led to a paradigm shift in all spheres requiring the average user of the data to be adept at mining the data, processing andmanaging them. The sheer volumes of these data are so huge that conventional solutions prove to be inadequate. The Workshop on Data Intensive Science was a joint attempt of IUCAA and Persistent Systems Ltd. (PSL), Pune, to empower the participants with tools and techniques in data science. This workshop was held during February 13 - 18, 2017 at IUCAA, and there were 60 participants, with almost half of them from astronomy research backgrounds, and the rest were from the local engineering colleges. The topics covered included Python programming language, databases, numerical techniques, machine learning techniques, and big data technology. The workshop had both theory as well as intensive lab sessions, and enabled a very fruitful interaction between higher level researchers in astronomy and engineering students, who were at crossroads in their career, contemplating on future directions. The workshop was coordinated by Ajit Kembhavi and Kaustubh Vaghmare from IUCAA, and Anand Deshpade and Shubhangi Kelkar fromPSL. Congratulations to ... Jayant V. Narlikar, for the Lakshmipat Singhania - IIM, Lucknow National Leadership Award 2016-2017 at the hands of Honourable President of India. ShyamN. Tandon, for the Space Science and Applications Award presented by Astronomical Society of India for the success of theUVITproject. Vacation Students’ Programme The annual Vacation Students’ Programme (VSP) was held during May 15 to June 30, 2017 at IUCAA. There were 14 students from various colleges/universities/institutes. The screening committee had a tough task to select the participants from a large number of online applications. Along with lectures on basic and advanced astronomy (held in common with the Refresher Course), the students worked on individual projects with faculty members and post-doctoral fellows of IUCAA, with topics covering a broad range of subjects across observational, instrumentational and theoretical aspects of Astronomy and Astrophysics. The students were also taken on a tour to the GMRT facility operated by the NCRA. The students enthusiastically participated in the programme, and presented their project work in seminars held at the end of the session. R. Srianand was the faculty coordinator of this programme.