Abstracts:

Suzy Dodd
The Voyager Journey into Interstellar Space
This talk will highlight the recent science results from the Voyager Interstellar Mission, as well as give a bit of history on Voyagers' Grand Tour of the outer planets. The talk will wrap up with a few notes on what I have learned since becoming the Voyager Project Manager.

Steve Groom
Big Databases: A Billion Here, a Billion There
Astronomy has very large datasets for a long time, but as with many fields in recent years, there has begun an explosion in the rate of data growth. The technical challenges in handling these data are not unique to Astronomy, and there are many examples from the commercial world that make our challenges look small. However unlike the commercial world, which can often afford to invest quite a bit in technologies to keep up, we are usually faced with trying to address similar challenges on very tight budgets. I will discuss a some of the techniques we are using at IRSA today, and review some of the approaches used by others including in the commercial (revenue-generating) world.

David Imel
'Pick'ing Apart Data
pick is a very flexible command-line application, written in perl, for extracting and printing arbitrarily formatted binary data. I will explain some of the situations where you might find this useful and give a brief introduction to the pick command language. The software is available from me (or github), and is completely self-contained and very portable.

Jeff Jacobson
How I Tested my MacPro's Fan
        - or -
Multi-threading Herschel Data Reduction
Today's mutl-core computer architectures provide and multi-threading software provide the opportunity for improvement in processing time, but only when the software is built to take advantage of these improvements. This talk will show how the JAVA Completions Service was used to thread the Herschel/PACS pipelines, even though this software was not built with parallel processing in mind. A small wrapper for the Completions Service, the application of this wrapper to a single pipeline task, and a hook (up in the inheritance tree) to thread an all PACS pipelines will be shown.

Dan Kozak
Managing LIGO's Data
The Laser Interferometer Gravitational Observatory now has ~150 million files/~3 petabytes of archived science data and ~1 billion/~300 terabytes of user data. I will describe how we are storing that data so as to ensure it's integrity and accessibilty.

Jake Llamas
Journey to the center of HTML and CSS
Introduction to HAML and CSS frameworks that can speed up development of web applications.

Trity Pourbahrami
The Engineering and Applied Sciences (EAS) Comm Office Approach for Multiple Websites
The Director of the Engineering and Applied Science (EAS) Communications Office, Trity Pourbahrami, will speak about the office's approach to building division, departmental, center, event, and faculty websites. The office designs and develops 10-15 new websites per year and serves 60 clients with a variety of web and design needs per year. Trity will demonstrate the ways the group taps into various Caltech resources and will share how they engage and reach a broader community. The session will be interactive with opportunities to learn from participants.

Luisa Rebull
NITARP: Updates on the NASA/IPAC Teacher Archive Research Program
NITARP, the NASA/IPAC Teacher Archive Research Program, gets teachers -- and some IPAC non-science staff -- involved in authentic astronomical research. We partner small groups of educators with a mentor professional astronomer for a year-long original research project using primarily archives housed at IPAC. NITARP educators are primarily high school teachers, though 8th grade and community college and even informal educators have participated. We select educators from a nationwide application process, and the teams run basically January-January, including a visit of 3-4 days in the Summer. We think it's important to involve some of the non-science IPAC staff as much as, well, you'll let us. I'll give an overview and update on the program and then talk about how you can participate, at any of a wide variety of levels. Our website is http://nitarp.ipac.caltech.edu/

Trey Roby
Using Firefly Tools to Enhance Archive Web Pages
Astronomy web developers are looking for fast and powerful HTML 5/AJAX tools to enhance their web archives. We are exploring ways to make this easier for the developer. How could you have a full FITS visualizer or a Web 2.0 table that supports paging, sorting, and filtering in your web page in 10 minutes? Can it be done without even installing any software or maintaining a server?

Firefly is a powerful, configurable system for building web-based user interfaces to access astronomy science archives. It has been in production for the past 3 years. Recently we have made some of the advance components available through very simple JavaScript calls. This allows a web developer, without any significant knowledge of Firefly, to have FITS visualizers, tables, and spectrum plots on their web pages with minimal learning curve. Because we use cross-site JsonP, installing a server is not necessary. Web sites that use these tools can be created in minutes.

We will give a brief talk overviewing Firefly Tools and then demo how to use theses components.

We are using Firefly to serve data for several projects, both ground and space based. These projects include Spitzer, Planck, WISE, PTF, LSST and others. The similarities between the different archive user interfaces greatly reduced the learning curve and enhanced the user experiences of the archive systems. Firefly was created in IRSA, the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive (http://irsa.ipac.caltech.edu).

Elena Scire
Publications - More than you ever wanted to know
The Spitzer Science Center maintains a database of peer-refereed publications utilizing observations made by the Spitzer Space Telescope. Originally intended as a way to easily track these publications with limited resources, the database has grown in scope to provide more services for investigators, and to allow insights on how people publish to be gathered.

Ashley Stroupe
Exploring Mars with Spirit and Opportunity
Come take a whirlwind tour of Mars with Spirit and Opportunity. We'll cover a summary of the rovers' capabilites (focusing on onboard autonomy), highlights of the important science results, and some fun stories from the last 8+ years.

Rich Terille
Rise of the Machines: Perspectives on Artificial Realities and Intelligence
This talk will illustrate the difference between the progression of the Space Age and the Information Age. As we seek to send intelligent spacecraft to explore new worlds, we are faced with the choice of human exploration versus machines. Virtual reality and immersive telepresence offer interesting alternatives as our computers grow in power. The ultimate goal however, is to create artificial intelligence. Here again, advanced computation through simulated evolution is providing an alternative to reverse engineering the human brain. Finally we examine what it means to live in a Universe that can be fully simulated by a three‐pound computer.

Lijun Zhang
Parallel Programming in Multi-Core Computers
While manufacturing technology improves, reducing the size of individual gates, the multi-core computers became very popular nowadays. This presentation will focus on how to use the multi-core computers effectively through thread level parallelism (TLP) method. The talk will focus on two popular threads APIs, openMP and Java Executor Framework.