Software, Algorithms, & Data Science

Since the early 2000’s, software and algorithms have become as integral to astrophysical discovery as the hardware. Astronomy has also served as a model for open source, community-driven software development, with major packages such as AstroML and Astropy.  Advances in machine learning, statistics, and data science methods, backed by high performance and cloud computing resources, are enabling discovery from ever increasing scales of data in all areas of astronomy. The UW Astronomy Department has been involved in many of these software systems now used across the field, and are leading the software development for the next generation of data-driven discoveries with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.