This month I really wanted to write a blog about my astonishing experiences with doing a case study for the Foreign Excursion Committee, the Buixie.

Why doing an internship?
Currently I am in my second year of my MSc Astronomy. When I started my master degree there were two specialisation options. This was where I choose the most applied specialisation called ‘Instrumentation and informatics’. In order to meet the requirements of the first year, I had to do an internship in the field of Information Technology. I really did not know where to go with the internship until T.F.V. ‘Professor Francken’ came with the solution: Doing a case study for the Buixie (Foreign Excursion committee) at ASTRON in Dwingeloo.

ASTRON and LOFAR
First I would like to tell you something about ASTRON as a company. ASTRON is the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy. Radio Astronomy and especially radio interferometry find its application in the LOw-Frequency ARray, known as LOFAR. This radio telescope uses sets of dipole antennas divided over core stations in the North of the Netherlands and remote stations all over Europe. LOFAR software is used to combine all electrical signals obtained by the individual stations during an observation, to form a so-called sky distribution.

In order to look into LOFAR, it was useful to come towards ASTRON every day. I still remember my first day, arriving in Dwingeloo with my mug and backpack. I got an office spot in a room known as the ‘Dinosaur room’. It appeared to be the former directors office with direct view on the Dwingeloo telescope. The first week I had to make a photo for the staff portrait gallery and I got a lesson from the assistant Working Conditions Act, how to sit properly behind a computer. I had to laugh hard when they placed a footstool below my feet. My colleagues were coming from all over Europe. Together we had lunch every day at 12:00 o’clock, and at 16:00 o’clock a (couple) cup(s) of coffee with cookies I baked the day before. There was always a nice ambiance at ASTRON, but of course work had to be done..

The project
My case study was part of the ADDER project, a collaboration between ASTRON and the Netherlands eScience Center located in Amsterdam. I can tell you, it is amazing to join Skype meetings where progresses are discussed with people all over the Netherlands. During my job interview, there was also a member of the eScience Center present through Skype. My part of the project implied using Machine Learning approaches in order to investigate how to support the System Health Management of LOFAR. Therefore I first had to understand the data pipelines of LOFAR and I had to find a way to monitor all relevant Meta information.

To give you an idea of what I did, I will try to summarise the main steps I had to take during the project.

• Studying the datasets, stored as MS files (Measurement Set) in order to try to understand the data processing of LOFAR. I found out that I could improve the data selection process. At that moment observers had to look at 741 inspection plots (plots showing frequency vs. timeslot) per observation, while lot of them looked similar.
• I wanted to find a way to join all inspection plots that looked the same in order to reduce the 741 plots to about 30 images. This would save time for the observer to investigate an observation. Therefore I looked into the machine learning technique ‘Clustering’.
• I found a way to read the Measurement Sets, find and store the relevant information and apply a clustering algorithm with the use of Python knowledge obtained during my BSc Astronomy. The program I wrote is now applied to LOFAR’s standard pipeline. This year together with eScience Center, my supervisor and I expect to publish a paper about our findings.

To summarise
I took a case study from the Buixie, I got a wonderful job experience, many amazing colleagues, a lot of knowledge about programming, a possible publication and a lot of fun.