Monday 13 – Thursday 16 August, 2012, Montana State University, Bozeman, MT, USA
Held since 2003, the Solar Image Processing workshops focus on the extraction of useful information from solar data. This meeting will broaden our attention to the more general problem of “Information Processing” and how to obtain the best scientific return out of the petabytes of data that are now available.
The next Solar Information Processing Workshop will be help
13-16 August, 2012 at Montana State University, Bozeman, Montana.
Solarsoft is a mainly IDL codebase for the analysis of solar physics data. To use Solarsoft, you need to setup the appropriate environment variables, etc in IDL and on your machine. This setup is commonly referred to as SSWIDL, and that’s what I will call this from now on.
Presentations from the 5th Solar Image Processing Workshop are now available at http://bit.ly/9MQh8n
The most recent workshop was held in Baltimore MD, 26-30 October 2008. The focus of this meeting was the comparison of computer vision algorithms developed for solar physics applications, and their effective implementation. The meeting attracted around 85 participants (fulfilling pre-meeting expectations), from both the solar physics and image processing communities. Lively workshop groups were held in 4 major areas: eruptive events (coronal mass ejections, prominence eruptions), solar disk features (filaments, sunspots, etc), oscillations in the solar corona (waves and wave mode identification), and solar physics from multiple viewpoints (3-d tomography of coronal mass ejections and reconstruction of active region coronal loop structures).
Some of the organizers of SIRW formed a collaboration to organize future workshops to follow a similar format. The organizing committee planned the next workshop for November 2004 in Annapolis, MD. The workshop name was changed to Solar Image Processing Workshop (SIPWII). SIPWII again brought together researchers from the field of solar physics, image processing and data mining. The workshop lasted for 3 days and consisted of invited talks, contributed talks and posters. This workshop focused on using current, up-to-date image processing techniques to maximize the scientific return from space- and ground-based solar observatories. SIPWII also introduced break-out sessions or working groups to discuss the topics of (1) the definition of CMEs for the purpose of detection and tracking, (2) techniques for ground-based image reconstruction, and (3) magnetic field image data. Some of the work presented in the workshop as well as related work in the field was published in a twenty-four paper Topical Issue of Solar Physics (Gallagher et al. 2005). Given the success of this workshop and the expressed interest of its participants, the organizing committee decided to continue these workshops roughly every 2 years with the location alternating between Europe and the United States.
The 3rd Solar Image Processing Workshop (SIPWIII), was held at Trinity College Dublin in September 2006. This time the workshop focused on challenges presented by new instrumentation including new ground based instrumentation such as the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope (ATST), Swedish Solar Telescope (SST) and Dutch Open Telescope (DOT), as well as recent and future space instrumentation on board the STEREO, Hinode and SDO spacecraft. The workshop had ~70 participants featuring invited and contributed talks, posters and breakout/open-ended discussion sessions (working groups). As with previous workshops, we emphasized that we were looking for topics that would be of interest to both the image processing and solar physics communities. The successful working group sessions were held in three groups, discussing (1) 3D tomography and visualization of the corona and heliosphere, (2) real-time data analysis and assimilation , and (3) fundamental image processing and statistics. Some presentations from this conference and related research have been compiled for a Topical Issue of Solar Physics (vol. 248, Young & Ireland 2009).