ESCAPE: Launch of the European Project for Data Management in Astronomy

20. November 2018

2019 marks the beginning of one of the biggest projects for data management in astronomy. The „European Science Cluster for Astronomy & Particle physics ESFRI research infrastructures” (short: ESCAPE) is a consortium of more than 30 European partners that is now developing different strategies to facilitate the management of data-driven research. The project aims, among other things, to make the European science cloud reality and to create infrastructures and methods to deal with the increasing amount of data in astronomy.

Kai Polsterer, HITS researcher and leader of the research group “Astroinformatics”, is part of the European consortium and contributes his expertise in the field of data processing. One of his main research focuses is machine learning. Due to the data flood in astronomy, scientists are facing problems processing and analyzing the data for their research. Kai Polsterer works on new methods in order to classify different objects for example, and to help other researchers with their work.

Press Release ESCAPE.

More about Kai Polsterer and his research.

Scientific Contakt:

Dr. Kai Polsterer
Leader Astroinformatics group
Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS)
Phone: +49-6221-533 314
kai.polsterer@h-its.org

About ESCAPE:

The European Union member states, recognising the challenges of data driven research in pursuing excellent science, have launched the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) initiative. EOSC is a cloud for research data in Europe allowing for universal access to data through a single online platform. EOSC will federate existing resources across national data centres, e-infrastructures and research infrastructures allowing researchers and citizens to access and re-use data produced by other scientists. EOSC success is based on continuous engagement with scientific stakeholders actively supporting its implementation and in their respective capacities. ESCAPE (European Science Cluster of Astronomy & Particle physics ESFRI research infrastructures) aims to address the Open Science challenges shared by ESFRI facilities (CTA, ELT, EST, FAIR,HL-LHC,KM3NeT, SKA) as well as other pan-European researchinfrastructures (CERN, ESO, JIV-ERIC, EGO-Virgo) in astronomy and particle physics research domains. The complexity of all this new apparatus in science grows rapidly, the data volume produced by them is seeing a tremendous increase and the software to analyse the data is becoming more and more complex. On the other hand, this data should be accessible to the growing scientific communities, as they collaborate and interact. The ESCAPE project brings together partners from astronomy and particle physics to collaborate on building the EOSC. The ESCAPE actions aim at delivering solutions to ensure integration of data, tools, services and scientific software; to foster common approaches to implement open-data stewardship; to establish interoperability within EOSC as an integrated multi-probe facility for fundamental science.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 824064.

About HITS

HITS, the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies, was established in 2010 by physicist and SAP co-founder Klaus Tschira (1940-2015) and the Klaus Tschira Foundation as a private, non-profit research institute. HITS conducts basic research in the natural, mathematical, and computer sciences. Major research directions include complex simulations across scales, making sense of data, and enabling science via computational research. Application areas range from molecular biology to astrophysics. An essential characteristic of the Institute is interdisciplinarity, implemented in numerous cross-group and cross-disciplinary projects. The base funding of HITS is provided by the Klaus Tschira Foundation.

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