Community Alert Brokers

Abstract: The development of community brokers to process the LSST alert stream and enable user science with alerts is well underway. In this session the Project will provide a brief update on the broker selection process, and many broker teams have provided informative materials and updates for the science community. Most of this session's time will be dedicated to Q&A between the Project, broker teams, and the broader science community. Anyone with questions, suggestions, or contributions for this session please contact Eric Bellm and Melissa Graham. Everyone is welcome to attend this session and ask questions, regardless of whether they had time to pre-view the materials below.

Agenda:

Q&A 1: 30 minute discussion with Rubin Obs. project staff on alert distribution and the broker selection process, based on the pre-recorded presentation provided by project staff (link below).

Q&A 2: 30 minute discussion with the Broker teams regarding their broker's features and how the community can (and is) using them, based on the materials provided by broker teams for the science community (links below).

To start Q&A 2, each broker team that provides materials will review them with a single slide (~30 seconds).

View the deck of Google slides for this session.

New to alerts and brokering?

Wecome! One place to start is slides 17 and 18 in this presentation, "Introduction to Rubin"; they cover the relevant alerts-related Data Management terms. Another excellent resource is the Data Products Definitions Document (ls.st/dpdd), in particular Section 3.5 "Alerts to DIASources".

Resources Available for Attendees

Please contact Melissa (mlg3k at uw dot edu) to add materials to this webpage.

Rubin Obs. Alert Production team: A video presentation by Eric Bellm titled "Status of Alert Broker Selection and Sample Alerts" (view the slides)

ALeRCE: A video presentation on the ALeRCE broker, a slide presentation titled "The Universe in a stream: the ALeRCE broker", and a set of jupyter notebooks demonstrating use cases for accessing the ALeRCE database, API, etc.

AMPEL: A slide presentation on AMPEL by Jakob Nordin.

ANTARES: A video presentation titled "Time-Domain Discovery in the 2020s Using the ANTARES Event Broker", a video demonstration of how to use the ANTARES broker web interface, and a video demonstration of how to use the ANTARES database to explore variability in light curves.

Fink: A video presentation titled "Fink - Enabling Time-Domain Astronomy in the Next Era" (view the slides).

Lasair: A video presentation titled "Lasair - UK:LSST Transient Broker" (view the slides).

Pitt-Google: A slide presentation on the "Pitt-Google Cloud-Based Broker" by Michael Wood-Vasey.

"Point of Interest" Variable Alerts: A slide presentation on the "Point of Interest" Variable Alerts broker by Nina Hernitschek.

SNAPS: A slide presentation on "SNAPS: The Solar System Notification Alert Processing System" by David Trilling.