The French AISSAI (AI for Science, Science for AI) program is glad to sponsor a hack week focused on the use of ML techniques in Astrophysics.

The goal of this hack week is to gather a small crowd to work on a couple of selected astro projects involving state-of-the-art machine learning, with a high potential for publication. Such a week will broaden your knowledge of astronomical datasets and teach you alternative ways of exploiting these data using neural-based techniques.

The AISSAI hackweek is proposed back to back and in the context of the AstroInfo school, but the participation in both events is decoupled.

Important Dates

• Pre-registration deadline: May 9th 2023
• Proposal submission deadline: May 9th 2023
• Acceptance notification date: Mid-May 2023
• Hackathon dates: July 3rd-7th

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Logistics

AISSAI Hackathon is planned as an in-person event. It will take place in Fréjus, South of France, early July (see location below).

The attendance will be limited to 20 participants, including junior and senior participants. Senior participants are required to submit a hackathon project upon registration (see CFP below). The organisers will guarantee the registration for senior participants with accepted hack proposals.

Confirmed participants will be offered the full accommodation (all meals + single room) for the entire week.

Due to the very limited number of participants, we will ask the accepted participants for a rapid confirmation of attendance to ensure all slots can be filled and people in the waitlist can be notified in time.

It is mandatory that all participants read and adhere to the hackathon code of conduct.

Inquiries regarding the hackathon can be directed to hackathonaissai@sciencesconf.org

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Call for hack proposals

We invite senior participants (e.g. with tenured or permanent position) to submit hack proposals at the cross-section of Astrophysics and Machine Learning.

We welcome all sorts of projects, provided they involve and engage several participants for the whole week on various tasks and lead to a publishable result.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of themes of interest:

• Anomaly and outlier detection, search for rare signals with ML
• Methods for improved interpretability of models
• Astrophysics-informed models, models which preserve symmetries and equivariances
• Deep Learning for accelerating numerical simulations

The successful applicants will work with the local organisers to prepare the hack material (project layout, open data, existing code, starting notebook, etc) in advance for the hackathon. We will provide dedicated time on a GPU-equipped French supercomputer for the whole week to achieve these goals, with a possibility to extend this time for advancing on the project later on.

Existing knowledge of Machine Learning is preferable but not mandatory, since there will be a local team available to work with the participants.

Please submit your proposals on the registration form before May 9th, 23:59 AOE (Anywhere on Earth).

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Location

Village Vacances Igesa « Destremau »
1848 Route de Cannes
83600 Fréjus
France

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Organisers

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Code of Conduct

The community of participants of the AISSAI AstroInfo Hackathon is made up of members from around the globe with a diverse set of skills, personalities, and experiences. It is through these differences that our community experiences success and continued growth. We expect everyone in our community to follow these guidelines when interacting with others both inside and outside of our community. Our goal is to keep ours a positive, inclusive, successful, and growing community.

As members of the community,

• We pledge to treat all people with respect and provide a harassment- and bullying-free environment, regardless of sex, sexual orientation and/or gender identity, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, nationality, ethnicity, and religion. In particular, sexual language and imagery, sexist, racist, or otherwise exclusionary jokes are not appropriate.
• We pledge to respect the work of others by recognizing acknowledgment/citation requests of original authors. As authors, we pledge to be explicit about how we want our own work to be cited or acknowledged.
• We pledge to welcome those interested in joining the community, and realize that including people with a variety of opinions and backgrounds will only serve to enrich our community. In particular, discussions relating to pros/cons of various technologies, programming languages, and so on are welcome, but these should be done with respect, taking proactive measure to ensure that all participants are heard and feel confident that they can freely express their opinions.
• We pledge to welcome questions and answer them respectfully, paying particular attention to those new to the community.
• We pledge to be conscientious of the perceptions of the wider community and to respond to criticism respectfully. We will strive to model behaviors that encourage productive debate and disagreement, both within our community and where we are criticized. We will treat those outside our community with the same respect as people within our community.
• We pledge to help the entire community follow the code of conduct, and to not remain silent when we see violations of the code of conduct. We will take action when members of our community violate this code such as notifying a workshop organizer or talking privately with the person.

This code of conduct applies to all community situations online and offline, including the conference itself, mailing lists, forums, social media, social events associates with the conference, and one-to-one interactions.

Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately. Attendees violating these rules may be asked to leave the event at the sole discretion of the conference organizers.

This code of conduct has been adapted from the AstroHackWeek Code of Conduct, itself based on the Python in Astronomy Code of Conduct.