Chairs: Melissa Graham

Brief presentations from broker teams for users on broker functionality as it exists now, and as it is planned, followed by some hands-on tutorials.

All are welcome, especially students and those new to thinking about whether and how to use alerts and brokers for their science.

Please contact the session chair with any questions, or if you'd like to volunteer to speak or help with this session.

Note that there will be a second broker-related session: Alert Brokers II: RSP Integrations for Developers.

reminder slides https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/14Lw5lVNImTeXm1qZirXWsoDCib3sQY3T...

Agenda (7 min + 3 for Q&A):

• Introduction to Alerts, Brokers, and other Concepts (Eric Bellm)

• The Lasair Broker: An introduction for users (Roy Williams)
• Using the Pitt-Google Alert Broker (Christopher Hernández)
• Doing science with the ALeRCE broker (Alejandra Muñoz-Arancibia)
• The Solar System Notification Alert Processing System (SNAPS): An LSST downstream broker (David Trilling)
• Fink broker tutorial (Anais Möller)
• ANTARES overview (Melissa Graham speaking for Tom Matheson)
• AMPEL (Jakob Nordin)

Abstracts (if not linked above)

The Lasair Broker: An introduction for users (Roy Williams): Lasair has been developed using ZTF and has a large, active, and diverse user community. Lasair enables a scientist to create a highly effective filter to separate the wanted from the unwanted. The filter is built from tabular data with SQL, and geometric constructions like watchlists and watchmaps. Lasair adds value through crossmatching many catalogues, as well as classifications from other brokers. Lasair encourages users to share their filters, build instant-response annotators, and thus return their results to be shared with others.

Using the Pitt-Google Alert Broker (Christopher Hernández): We will present an update on the status of the Pitt-Google Alert Broker and discuss current input alert streams, classifiers, and output classification streams.  Then we will present examples of (1) choosing a stream to listen to; (2) adding your own classifier to the Pitt-Google Alert Broker; and (3) querying the alert database.

Doing science withthe ALeRCE broker (Alejandra Muñoz-Arancibia): Since 2019, more than 180 articles refer to ALeRCE in a diverse set of science cases such as transients, AGN, novae, microlensing, and variable stars. We will review the main tools available from the ALeRCE broker and how they are enabling new scientific discoveries.

Fink broker tutorial (Anais Möller): Fink is a Rubin Community broker already deployed processing ZTF data. I will present our current services to access data  through the Fink broker as well as real life examples of scientific analysis.

ANTARES overview: ANTARES is a real-time astronomy system under development at NOIRLab. We ingest all alerts from the ZTF survey and run filters on them in real-time. Filters are python functions that determine whether an alert is of interest or not. Filters flag alerts for distribution by various output streams depending on their properties. All are welcome to make an account and try out ANTARES.