Big Data Analytics and Cognitive Computing: coming to observatory near you!

© ASTRON

The days of the lone astronomer with his optical telescope and photographic plates are long gone. The future of astronomy will not only be multi-wavelength, but multi-messenger in nature, often dominated by huge data sets and matching data rates. Catalogues listing detailed properties of billions of objects will in themselves require a new "industrial-scale" approach to scientific discovery, requiring the latest techniques of Advanced Big Data Analytics to be applied. An early engagement with the first generation of cognitive computing systems is also a looming opportunity for our field.

Projects like the ASTRON-IBM DOME collaboration are important vehicles for making early progress in these exciting new areas of multi-disciplinary research. Applying cognitive computing to large astronomical surveys, could have a huge impact in terms of serendipitous discovery - areas that might especially benefit include those like SETI, where human bias and other pre-conceptions may limit current efforts.

The image above shows IBM�s Watson machine (left) and a LOFAR based SETI search campaign (right). Watson represents an important step forward towards realising cognitive computer systems but further progress requires revolutionary new architectures to be developed that mimic the human brain.

A paper describing these opportunities was presented at the recent Radio 2014 meeting: http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.7021