Daily Note (13th August 2026)
Met Curt Dodds today and talked a bunch about computing at IfA and at the university as a whole. Got to learn more about NaHoku (the IfA cluster, smart, snappy, and a good time) and Koa (the UH cluster, powerful, oversubscribed, and likes to make you wait). Talked about proposals, including the NSF's NRP and major research infrastructure (MRI) proposals we could write, and other opportunities. Also talked about our AI/ML resarch interests and ideas, datasets (MMU from my side, PanSTARRS, ATLAS and more from Curt/IfA), and about the UH data science institute and its priorities.
Also talked with MJ a bit more about their project, looks like we're converging on an idea loosely based off our DeepDASH proposal (rip), with an encoder-decoder architecture that we use for probablistic superresolution/upscaling, and then can apply to various science questions *(bar stability, clumpiness, bulge growth, quenching timescale etc.). We'll probably start of low-z (ground-based) for the initial dataset, but this could be augmented in the future.
Continued working on the computing survey, didn't circulate it because I got a bit too much feedback and need to think about how to best incorporate it.
New grad student orientation today, with a bunch of folks from Hilo visiting for it. Got to talk with Chris Baranec for a bit as a result, over things ranging from the fate of telescopes on Mauna Kea to coursework and AI at UH, to using agentic systems to work with adaptive optics data (which is a really cool idea, so i hope we get a student that can work on that with us).
There's supposed to be a storm tomorrow and over the weekend, so i've done gone and got me some water and canned food. Let's see how it goes.