BRICS academics will gather at Ural Federal University to discuss astronomical data and comp

EKATERINBURG, Russian Federation - Aug. 19, 2016 - PRLog -- The inaugural meeting of the BRICS Astronomy Working Group, consisting of senior officials and experts from the governments of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, was held in Cape Town on 12 December 2015.  One of the key resolutions of the Working Group was the decision to hold the annual Working Group meetings back-to-back with scientific workshops, which will provide a platform for BRICS member countries to engage on policy issues and other matters related to research, development and practice in astronomy, and to explore mechanisms for promoting BRICS cooperation in astronomy.

By decision of the BRICS Astronomy Working Group the next scientific workshop will take place September 5-7, 2016, at the Ural Federal University in Ekaterinburg, Russia.  The science workshop in Russia will focus on Astronomical Data and Computation involving data science, inter-operability of data, access to data archives, computational astrophysics, hardware and software access, etc.

Presentations at the workshop will be split into six sessions: 1) Databases and archives, 2) Open data exchange, 3) Modeling and analysis, 4) Computation and algorithms, 5) Data logistics (transfer, reduction, storage), 6) "V"s of big data.

The keynote speakers at the event are:

·         Prof. Rosa Reinaldo, Titular Researcher, Laboratory for Computing and Applied Mathematics, National Institute of Space Research, Brazil

·         Prof. Nikolay Samus, Leading Researcher at the Department of Non-Stationary Stars and Stellar Spectroscopy heading the group of the General Catalogue of Variable Stars, Moscow State University, Russia

·         Prof. Harinder P. Singh, Professor, Department of Physics & Astrophysics, University of Delhi, India

·         Prof. Liang Gao, Director of Key Laboratory for Computational Astrophysics, Researcher, National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Leading specialists in numerical techniques, modeling and analysis of constantly growing volumes of data from the BRICS countries will take part in the workshop. Russia will be represented by scientists (SAO RAN, INASAN, MSU, UrFU) and IT specialists (Yandex).

More information about the workshop can be found at http://astro.brics.urfu.ru/en/astrodata2016/. Registration is open until September 1, 2016.