IEEE Computer: Special Issue on Computing in Astronomy

IEEE Computer: Special Issue on Computing in Astronomy

Edited by Victor Pankratius (MIT) and Chris Mattmann (NASA)
Final submissions due: December 1, 2013
Publication date: September 2014

Computer seeks submissions for a September 2014 special issue on computing in astronomy.

Computer science has become a key enabler in astronomy's ability to progress beyond the processing capacity of humans. In fact, computer science is a major bottleneck in the quest of making new discoveries and understanding the universe. Sensors of all kinds collect vast amounts of data that require unprecedented storage capacity, network bandwidth, and compute performance in cloud environments. We are now capable of more sophisticated data acquisition, analysis, and prediction than ever before, thanks to progress in parallel computing and multicore technologies. Social media, open source, and distributed scientific communities have also shed light on new methods for spreading astronomical observations and results quickly. The field of astroinformatics is emerging to unite interdisciplinary efforts across several communities.

This special issue aims to present high-quality articles to the computer science community that describe these new directions in computing in astronomy and astroinformatics. Only submissions describing previously unpublished, original, state-of-the-art research that are not currently under review by a conference or journal will be considered.

Appropriate topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

- Collecting and processing big data in astronomy
- Multicore systems, GPU accelerators, high-performance computing, clusters, clouds
- Data mining, classification, information retrieval
- Computational astronomy, simulations, algorithms
- Astronomical visualization, graphics processing, computer vision
- Crowdsourcing and social media in astronomical data collection
- Computing aspects of next-generation instruments, sensor networks
- Astronomical open source software and libraries
- Automated searches for astronomical objects or phenomena, such as planets, pulsars, organic molecules
- Feature and event recognition in complex multidimensional datasets
- Analysis of cosmic ray airshower data of various kinds
- Computing in antenna arrays, very long baseline interferometry

The guest editors are soliciting three types of contributions: (1) regular research articles describing novel research results (full page l ength, 5,000 words); (2) experience reports describing approaches, instruments, experiments, or missions, with an emphasis on computer science aspects (half the page length of a regular article, 2,500 words); and (3) sidebars serving as summaries or quick pointers to projects, missions, systems, or results that complement any of the topics of interest (600 words).

Articles should be original and understandable to a broad audience of computer science and engineering professionals. All manuscripts are subject to peer review on both technical merit and relevance to Computer's readership. Accepted papers will be professionally edited for content and style.

For additional information, contact the guest editors directly: Victor Pankratius, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Haystack Observatory (http://www.victorpankratius.com); and Chris Mattman, NASA JPL (http://sunset.usc.edu/~mattmann).

Paper submissions are due December 1, 2013. For author guidelines and information on how to submit a manuscript electronically, visit http://www.computer.org/portal/web/peerreviewmagazines/computer

[Link to this CFP at IEEE: http://goo.gl/0T4JY]