Intelligent Agents And Robotic Telescopes

dpp writes "Astronomers working on the eSTAR Project have used software "Intelligent Agents" to control the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope and observe a dwarf nova. One of the astronomers says "The Agents can detect and respond to the rapidly changing universe faster than any human... [they] can be used to assist human observers, instead of replacing them entirely - augmenting their abilities to do science quicker, faster, and more reliably." Next up: getting results sent automatically to your 2.5G/3G mobile phone (with images!), and deploying on more telescopes including the Liverpool Telescope and the Faulkes Telescopes. The full story is at the Joint Astronomy Centre."

Comments

Nostalgia trip

[Max Romantschuk]

Way back in 95(ish) I remeber this "intelligent agent" app, called Rover if I remeber correctly. It was suppose to help you searching the web (ah, the pre Google days).

You could enter criteria, it'd crawl and you could rate the results, so it would learn to do it's thing better...

The thing never really worked though, and I'm still waiting for my voice activated, "Grab me some information on stellar physics, and compile into a simple tutorial please." -style agent.

OK, I'm sort of off topic here, but still, interresting ideas.

From the article...

[RyoSaeba]

Next up: getting results sent automatically to your 2.5G/3G mobile phone (with images!)

Is this so urgent AND important results can't wait?
I mean, yes nice to have that pic right away, but are you gonna rush to work because some nice results came in? or do you decide it can wait till tomorrow and regular hour days?

Jeez, i don't mind technology, but this myth of 'everything right now, even if it's ultimately not that urgent and/or important' pisses me off...

Yes, it's offtopic.

Re:From the article...

[aallan]

It wasn't clear to me from the article how much reduction these agents are doing to the telescope output, but I imagine there's a good deal of difference between what they are doing and the process you follow in a thorough post-event analysis of the images/spectra/etc?

Actually, no. These days most of the research class telescopes (including UKIRT and the JCMT at the Joint Astronomy Centre in Hawaii) have real time data reduction pipelines. These output publishable quality data, the days of spending six months reducing your data after coming back from an observing run aren't over yet, but we're getting there.

The agents themselves pull the results directly off the data reduction pipeline, and perform real time analysis to see if there is anything interesting by data mining online catalogues and meta-data databases (such as CDS SIMBAD). They they can make a decision to make further observations.

Have a look at the project website for more information.

Al.