Rationale | Committees | Code of Conduct

Rationale

During the past 20 years there has been a resumption of a dialogue between astronomers and statisticians. This dialogue has been fruitful and has been the origin of a new discipline that is now widely called Astrostatistics. The main tools for comparing theoretical results with observations in astronomy are statistical. However, the development of huge astronomical databases presents challenges of scale, and has initiated an active use of newly-developed statistical techniques in astronomy, notable examples being sparsity and compressed sensing.

The meeting is especially timely from the point of view of cosmological surveys, where the size makes application of a fully Bayesian analysis computationally extremely demanding, especially in the realm of model selection. Pan-STARRS will have a complete survey of 3π steradians of petabyte size; the Dark Energy Survey and the VST KiDS surveys will be well underway presenting similar difficulties in the data analysis. Moreover, the cosmological community will be preparing for LSST and for Euclid, a survey of a large fraction of the sky at an angular resolution close to that of the Hubble Space Telescope. Wide-field spectroscopic cosmology surveys of will be targeting over 10 million objects with a spectral resolution of 5000, with the SKA precursors will be grappling with data challenges which currently are unsolved. These examples also highlight the big current role and even bigger future role of archival data in astrophysics research.

The Cosmo21 conference is organised in conjunction with the 9th edition of the Astronomical Data Analysis (ADA9) summer school, which aims to provided younger researchers with technical skills required to deal with modern data.

Scientific Organising Committee

Local Organising Committee

Code of Conduct

The organisers are committed to making this meeting productive and enjoyable for everyone involved, regardless of age, body size, disability, ethnicity, gender, marital status, nationality, physical appearance, political affiliation, pregnancy, race, religion or sexual orientation.

Participants are expected the adhere to the following guidelines at all times:

1. Behave professionally. Harassment and sexist, racist, or exclusionary comments or jokes are not appropriate at any time (including lunches and social events). Harassment includes verbal or physical abuse, offensive comments, sustained disruption of talks or other events, inappropriate physical contact, sexual attention or innuendo, deliberate intimidation, stalking, and photography or recording of an individual without consent.
2. Be respectful. We endeavour to provide a safe, comfortable and professional work environment. Participants should be courteous with the opinions of others and be mindful not to exclude anyone from discussions or work-related activities. In particular, participants should avoid making derogatory comments or jokes that may be damaging to the career prospects of others.
3. All communication should be appropriate for a professional audience including people of many different backgrounds. Racist, sexual or sexist language and/or imagery is not appropriate.

Participants asked to stop any inappropriate behaviour are expected to comply immediately. Attendees violating these rules may be asked to leave the meeting at the sole discretion of the organisers. Any participant who wishes to report a violation of this policy is asked to speak, in confidence, to Samuel Farrens (samuel.farrens@cea.fr) and/or Valeria Pettorino (valeria.pettorino@cea.fr) who will be in-place during the conference.

The above code of conduct is based on the “London Code of Conduct“, as originally designed for the conference “Accurate Astrophysics. Correct Cosmology”, held in London in July 2015. The London Code was adapted with permission by Andrew Pontzen and Hiranya Peiris from a document by Software Carpentry, which itself derives from original Creative Commons documents by PyCon and Geek Feminism. It is released under a CC-Zero licence for reuse. To help track people’s improvements and best practice, please retain this acknowledgement, and log your re-use or modification of this policy at https://github.com/apontzen/london_cc.