Tech Talks


Tech Talks is a forum to connect the Rubin LSST software community, showcasing work by the broad Rubin software and archives community designed to enable LSST science. We hope it will provide a forum for a range of groups and authors to present, learn about, and discuss efforts of interest to analysis of LSST data.

Tech Talks are delivered virtually every second Thursday of the month at 10:00 a.m. Pacific. You can access it via Zoom at https://ls.st/lincc-talks. The recordings are publicly available generally within a week of the talk. Want to receive future seminar announcements?

Upcoming Talks

Date:  Thursday, July 9
Speaker: Craig Pellegrino

Title: GOPREAUX: Spectrophotometric Templates of Extragalactic Transients Using Gaussian Process Regression

Abstract:
Over the coming decade, time-domain surveys such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time will discover millions of extragalactic transient candidates. Photometrically classifying these transients will be necessary; however, most current classification efforts are ill-equipped to handle the large volume of transients discovered at high redshifts, where the rest-frame ultraviolet emission is redshifted into the observer-frame optical and infrared. To address this shortcoming, we have created new spectrophotometric templates of different classes of extragalactic transients, with a particular focus on core-collapse supernovae. These templates leverage two decades of transient observations with the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, along with publicly-available survey data, to model transient emission from the ultraviolet to the infrared across a range of phases using Gaussian Process Regression. This enables a forecasted light curve or spectrum at arbitrary wavelength or phase. In this talk I will describe the process of generating these templates as well as our open-source codebase named GOPREAUX. I will also demonstrate how these templates can be used to train photometric classification algorithms, and how our template predictions compare to other synthetic datasets and regression models in the literature. Finally, I will conclude by describing a number of physical inferences made possible with these template models.

Past Talks

The slides from previous talks can be found here.

June 11, 2026

  • EzTaoX: Scalable and Flexible Multiband Modeling of AGN Light Curves in the Rubin Era
  • Recording

May 14, 2026

  • Redback: A software package for modelling and inference of electromagnetic transients
  • Recording

April 9, 2026

  • LightCurveLynx – Forward Modeling of Time-Domain Surveys
  • Recording

March 12, 2026

  • Hyrax – A low-code solution for rapid experimentation with ML in astronomy
  • Recording

February 12, 2025

  • AppleCiDEr: Scalable Multimodal Transient Classification for Rubin-Era Alert Streams
  • Recording

Dec 11, 2025

  • Follow-up Coordination for the Solar System Community in the Rubin Era using FOMO
  • Recording

Nov 13, 2025

  • Enhancing interpretability in generative ML modeling: statistically disentangled latent spaces guided by generative factors in scientific datasets by Arkaprabha Ganguli
  • Recording

October 9, 2025

  • Scarlet2: A multi-resolution forward modeling framework for joint analysis of imaging data from Rubin and complementary surveys by Charlotte Ward
  • Recording

September 11, 2025

  • LINCC Frameworks in Year 3 by Jeremy Kubica
  • Recording

July 10, 2025

  • Building Rubin Citizen Science: Technical Architectures Behind First Look & Comet Catchers
  • Recording

June 12, 2025

  • PhotoD with the LSST: stellar distances out to the edge of Halo by Lovro Palaversa

May 8, 2025

  • Modular Metrics for the LSST Spectroscopic Recommendation System by Amanda Wasserman
  • Recording

April 10, 2025

  • Orbit Fitting at LSST Scale by Matt Holman
  • Recording

March 13, 2025

  • Progress towards a UK-based Independent Data Access Centre by George Beckett
  • Recording

February 13, 2025

  • One Network to Rule Them All: Multi-Modal Foundation Models for Survey Astronomy by Francois Lanusse (slides)
  • Recording

December 12, 2024

November 14, 2024

  • Redshift Assessment Infrastructure Layers (RAIL), a public code for end-to-end photo-z stress-testing and Rubin-scale production by Tianqing Zhang
  • Recording

October 10, 2024

  • Enabling Massive Correlation Functions in the LSST Era by Emilio Donoso
  • Recording

September 12, 2024

  • A Systematic Search for Main-Sequence Dipper Stars using the Zwicky Transient Facility by Anastasios Tzanidakis
  • Recording

August 8, 2024

  • Photometric redshifts using template fitting in the era of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory by Raphael Shirley
  • Recording

July 11, 2024

  • A Universe To Be Decided: Democratising Science for Everyone by Jo Ciuca
  • Recording

June 13, 2024

  • LINCC Frameworks LSDB & TAPE – Scalable analysis across large datasets by Neven Caplar and Doug Branton
  • Recording

May 9, 2024

  • Rubin Science Platform – Enabling Data-Driven Science with the LSST by Leanne Guy
  • Recording

April 11, 2024

  • Fink: enabling multi-messenger astronomy in the Rubin era by Emille Ishida

March 14, 2024

  • DeepDISC photo-z: Integrating image-based photo-z estimation in RAIL by Grant Merz
  • lsdb-macauff: The Trials and Tribulations of Catalogue Cross-Matching in the Era of LSST by Tom Wilson
  • Recording

Feb 8, 2024

  • The Supernova Exchange 2.0: Software for the follow-up of extragalactic transients in the Rubin era by Craig Pellegrino
  • Recording

December 7, 2023

  • Sorcha: A open-source LSST Solar System Simulator by Meg Schwamb
  • Superphot+: a LINCC Frameworks Incubator Pipeline by Kaylee de Soto
  • Recording

November 9, 2023

September 14, 2023

  • Technical topics of common interest to Rubin and Roman by Knut Olsen & Harry Ferguson
  • Advanced Scientific Data Format by Perry Greenfield
  • Recording

July 13, 2023

June 08, 2023

  • Moving object image searches: a case study for metadata models by Stephen Gwyn
  • Recording

May 11, 2023

April 13, 2023

March 9, 2023

  • Jupyter and STScI: A Platform and a Tool (Erik Tollerund) & MAST: A Multi-Mission Archive by Susan Mullally) 
  • Recording

February 9, 2023

  • The TOM Toolkit: Observing platform for Rubin follow-up and recent upgrades for O4 by Rachel Street, William Lindstrom, Joey Chatelain
  • SkyPortal: A technical ecosystem enabling multi-messenger astrophysics by Josh Bloom, Michael Coughlin) 
  • Recording

January 26, 2023

  • Introducing the LINCC Frameworks Incubator series (LINCC Frameworks team) 
  • Recording

December 8, 2022

November 10, 2022

  • Timeseries in Astronomy – Sunpy by Will Barnes
  • SER-SAG Periodicity pipeline Inkind contribution by Andjelka Kovacevic 
  • Recording

October 13, 2022

  • LINCC Frameworks Projects in Yr1: from bulk-data formats to photo-z testbeds by Jeremy Kubica and the LINCC Frameworks team
  • Recording