Summer school SPACE::LAB 2020

Education instead of summer vacation. That’s what is preferred by young people who wanted to take part in space research and space engineering. They took advantage of the opportunity offered by Department of Space Physics at Institute of Experimental Physics SAS in Košice within the SPACE::LAB project and enrolled in the summer school. This year’s Summer School has began on August 24.

The summer school was opened by project coordinator RNDr. Šimon Mackovjak, PhD. in the premises of the department on Bulharská street. Innovative educational program is supported by European Space Agency (ESA) within the scope of the Plan for European Cooperating States program (PECS), which is financially supported by the Government of the Slovak Republic. The main topic of the summer school is „Develop your own virtual observatory“. “Data are one of the most scarce commodities. This is especially true for the astronomical data because they record phenomena which no longer have to be repeated. However, one of the current issues is how to process, store and present already recorded data, which are obtained in gigabyte volumes thanks to automatic telescopes. The goal of our summer school is to learn how to utilize contemporary IT approaches to collect and store the data using Python microservices, their automatic processing using Machine Learning techniques as well as their presentation via web application. Therefore participants are able to build their own virtual observatory thanks to mastering the entire end-to-end solution,” explained the choice of topic and the goal of educating those interested in space research and space engineering astrophysicist Šimon Mackovjak, recent holder of the SAS Award for Popularization of Science.

The organizers were mostly concerned about the ever changing numbers of the COVID-19 positive cases and feared that they would have to cancel the lectures at the last minute, as it already happened during the first SPACE HACKATHON which had to be moved from April to mid-November. The epidemiological situation was in the end acceptable for organizing the second year of summer school, so that almost two dozen university students and young IT workers can acquire new knowledge. Half of them are returning to Košice regularly, as they participated in the first year of the summer school on the “Machine learning and Space data”, which was organized by researchers in collaboration with IT company GlobalLogic. During the three days, the speakers will give them lectures e.g. about the virtual observatory as an essential part of space research, technological solutions and why to use Python, data acquisition and their organization, processing and visualization, about the Machine Learning as an effective tool for data processing, presentation of the data through the web application: back-end, as well as front-end. They will also work on their own projects.

Original text: News at SAS (published on August 25, 2020)
Author of the original text: Katarína Čižmáriková
Photo: Katarína Čižmáriková and SPACE::LAB archive