Colloquium on May. 11, 2021

The ALeRCE broker

Speaker: Paula Sanchez (MIA)

Venue: Video Conference

Time: 09:00 AM, Tuesday, May. 11, 2021

Abstract:

With a new generation of large etendue survey telescopes there is a growing need for astronomical alert processing systems, which involve the real–time processing of data for alert generation, real–time annotation and classification of alerts and real–time reaction to interesting alerts using available astronomical resources. In this talk I will introduce a new alert classification and reaction system called ALeRCE: Automatic Learning for the Rapid Classification of Events. ALeRCE is currently processing the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) alert stream, in preparation for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. In particular, I will present the ALeRCE stamp classifier, which uses a convolutional neural network on the first detection stamp of a source to classify it among five broad classes, namely variable star, active galactic nuclei, SN, asteroid, or bogus; and the ALeRCE light curve classifier, which uses variability features computed from the alert light curves to classify each source into finer (currently 15) subclasses among three of the five broad classes.