Phone:+41-56-462-4062
Fax:+41-56-462-4482
email andre dot csillaghy at fhnw dot ch
Last update Feb 2011
Check here for the
Information Generation course.
Shortcut: Check here for the RHESSI software.
Teaching
Spring Semester 2011
Calendar
Projects
HESPE
It has been recognized since the early
days of the space program that high-energy observations play a crucial
role in understanding the basic mechanisms of solar eruptions.
Unfortunately, the peculiar nature of this radiation makes it so
difficult to extract useful information from it that nonconventional
observational techniques together with complex data analysis procedures
must be adopted. The rationale of this project is to to mainstream the
exploitation of high energy solar physics data in Europe by means of
three complementary activites: theory, computation, and technology. The
theory activity builds the background necessary to generalize the use
of these data. The computation activity focuses on mathematical
techniques to efficiently extract information out of the data. The
technology activity builds upon these two work packages to generate
science ready data products. These products will be easy to use by both
the broader solar and heliospheric physics community, and the space
weather community. HESPE will pave the way not only for the
exploitation of the sheer amount of data already available today, but
also for the future high energy solar space missions planned. This way,
the project as a whole will guarantee a stable and long term
positioning of Europe in the sustainable exploitation of such data
products.
STIX
STIX provides imaging spectroscopy of
solar thermal and non-thermal X-ray emission. STIX will provide
quantitative information on the timing, location, intensity, and
spectra of accelerated electrons as well as of high temperature thermal
plasmas, mostly associated with flares and/or microflares.
CASSIS
Solar System science has traditionally
been undertaken within a number of separate disciplines. However, like
any system its aspects are inter-related and it has been difficult to
address these aspects because of the lack of the integrating technology
required to span the inter-disciplinary boundaries. While advances in
technology means that the intrinsic differences between disciplines
(manifest in differing data formats and dependencies) are beginning to
be addressed, it is necessary to coordinate our efforts in order to
help break down the barriers.
Under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), the European Commission is
funding three projects that are directly relevant to this issue –
HELIO, Europlanet RI and SOTERIA. Within their own areas, each is
making significant improvements to the infrastructure that supports
their communities and enabling increased ability to do science.
Within CASSIS we propose to take steps to move to the next level by
cooperating in a number of areas. The cooperation will be in three main
areas:
We will investigate ways to improve the interoperability between data
and metadata from the domains. We will also investigate the possibility
of sharing some metadata resources.
We will coordinate the use of standard within the projects and reflect
any changes that are required to organizations like the IVOA and IPDA.
We will coordinate our dissemination activities in order to create a
more coherent and comprehensive approach. As part of this activity, we
will hold meetings of key players in order to lobby the case for solar
system science with the decision makers and funding agencies.
Phoenix-3
We are involved in the design and implementation of the new data
transfer and analysis infrastructure for the solar
radiotelescopes of the Institute
of Astronomy at ETH Zurich. It includes three parts: an automatic
transfer system, a web tool for browsing quicklook data, (DIRAC), and a dynamic
environment for science analysis, included in solarsoft, the most widely
used data analysis package for solar science.
Check my page summarizing the
information on this project.
HELIO
HELIO is a large Virtual Observatory project funded by the
European Union. The goal is to federate European data and metadata
services in the heliophysics area, in order to allow (1) an integrated
access to heliophysics resources in Europe and around the world; (2)
provide new science added value by making cross-instrument, cross
catalogs complex queries; and (3) provide a (distributed) data base for
data mining in these data sets, allowing a new approach of the data
explotation in this domain. This project is in collaboration with many
European and U.S. partners and builds up on the EGSO legacy. It is coordinated with
the NASA U.S. HDMC
effort, as well as Lockheed's Helio-Informatics
project.
ESA's Herschel
and its HIFI
instrument
Herschel is a spacecraft for the study of galaxy evolution. It
observes domains of the far infrared electromagnetic spectrum that have
never been explored before. The Swiss software development effort
within the HIFI ICC includes design and implementation of packages of
the Herschel Common Science System (HCSS) and the data analysis of the
HIFI instrument. We are in charge of the HIFI generic pipeline branch
(which prcesses instrument data to make the data interpretable by
scientists), the Herschel spectral tools, a set of data analysis
algorithms usable with HIFI, PACS and SPIRE, allowing cross-instrument
data analysis, and the Herschel documentation framework.
This is a collaboration with many partners, check the Herschel
website for more details.
Check the latest
poster from ADASS 2008.
RHESSI is a spacecraft lauched in 2002 for observing the sun in
the hard x-ray and gamma ray spectrum. I am involved in the
architecture, design, and implementation of the data analysis system. I
develop the utility classes and the framework of the overall system.
Please visit my RHESSI page for more
information.
See also: past
projects
General information
Research focus:
Information integration and data analysis
systems for large scientific
data collections
Memberships:
Associate Editor for Springer's Journal Earth
Science Informatics
Scientific Committee Member of the
Action Specifique Observatoire
Virtuel France
Swiss delegate of the International Space Weather Initiative
Swiss Association for Research in
Information Technology
IEEE Computer Society
Swiss Society for Astronomy
and Astrophysics
Swiss Virtual Institute of Solar
Science
International Astronomical Unions
Div II: Working group on Solar Data Access
American Geophysical Union
Selected items:
Csillaghy, A., Etesi, L.I., Zarro, D.M., Tolbert, K.A., Dennis, B.R.,
Schwartz, R.A., Extending the Virtual Solar Observatory to Incorporate
Data Analysis Capabilities,
poster (pdf) at
the American Geophysical Union Meeting,
December 2008
Csillaghy,
A., Soldati, M., Kunz, P., Bentley, R.D., Scholl, I., Accessing
the EGSO Grid through a
WSRF-Enabled API, Proc. ADASS XV, 2006 (pdf).
Schwartz, R. A.;
Csillaghy, A.; Tolbert, A. K.; Hurford, G. J.;
McTiernan, J.; Zarro, D., 2002, RHESSI Data Analysis Software:
Rationale and Methods, Solar Physics, v. 210, Issue 1, p. 165-191 (pdf).
Csillaghy,
A., Zarro, D.M., Freeland, S., Steps Towards a Virtual Solar
Observatory, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, 18, No 2, pp41-48, 2001 (pdf).
Csillaghy, A.,
Hinterberger, H., and Benz, A.O., Content-Based Image Retrieval in
Astronomy, Information Retrieval, 3, pp 229-241, Springer ed.,
2000 (pdf).
more
publications
...
Vita:
Grew up
in Carouge (Geneva),
Switzerland
Diploma in
Software Engineering at ETH in Zurich, Switzerland, 1991
PhD in technical
sciences from the Department of
Computer
Science also
at ETH, 1997
Computer
Scientist in the RHESSI
project at the Space Sciences
Laboratory in UC Berkeley,
1998-2001
Faculty member
at UAS
Northwestern Switzerland, 2001-present
Other
activities:
Music: Trumpet, playing in the University's Bigband.
Gardening, cooking, beer brewing, hiking, reading, ...
Science Advisor at fingertip,
science outreach with interactive exhibits
That's it for now!
