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This is what DZA kindly turned my little A3-format job ad into. They even let me display it next to the serious science posters of ADASS. Well: we will be hiring soon.
It's time for the Southern Spring Interop (coverage of previous Interops) again, which traditionally happens back-to-back with ADASS. And since ADASS XXXV (yes, it's 35 years now since the first ADASS, a timespan that Christophe Arviset illustrated rather impressively in a conference talk) takes place in Görlitz, Germany, at least the ground legwork for the Interop fell into the lap of the German VO organisation, i.e. GAVO. Oh my: I'm LOC chair!
Right now, ADASS is still going on, and thus I am just the other blissful conference participant at this point. Well, except that we will be hiring soon, and the ADASS organisers were kind enough to print and let me display something like an oversized and somewhat vague vacancy notice. I had thought about something in A3. See the opening photo for how it has worked out: Thanks!
Let me repeat the contents to my gentle readers: If you are enthusiastic about the VO and would like to contribute to it, do contact me (or perhaps first have a look the PDF detailing what you could be doing).
Given my extra duties as part of the LOC, I do not think I will do my traditional live coverage of the Interop (which starts on Thursday). But still: Watch this space for updates.
Update: Soapbox (2025-11-12)
We have heard a lot of talks again advertising one “science platform“ or other here at ADASS. I fairly invariably cringe when watching them because to me these platforms are (usually) the return to the old „data silos“ (where someone sat on a bunch of tapes or later disks and handed out data on request if you politely asked and had some way to divine it was there), except that now people not only control the metadata and data but also who can perform which sort of computation until when.
Even worse: Something you developed on one such platform will almost never work on the next platform; it will also break at the platform operators' discretion, and even the data you worked with will be gone at the whim of the platform operators or, more frequently, their funders.
Against that, I'm a strong believer in Mike Masnick's 2019 credo Protocols, Not Platforms – which of course is also underlying the much older IVOA; back in 2000, it would have been “protocols, not FTP Servers“, and a little later “protocols, not data silos“.
Let's try really hard to keep the user in control of their data and execution environments.
„But, but“, I hear you pant, „nobody can download our petabytes or data“.
Sure. Nor should they. You can do exciting things with the dozens-of-Terabyte (soon to be roughly-a-Petabyte) Gaia data from a tiny little device thanks to TAP, because you can select and aggregate using standard protocols (“learn once, use anywhere“) on the server side – and then only transfer and store locally not much more than 10 times the data you will eventually use in your research. That is thanks to TAP and ADQL.
For array-like data (images, cubes, and the like) we don't have anything standardised that would be nearly as powerful as TAP and ADQL (well: there is ArraySQL as advertised by me in 2017), which is part why so many people feel compelled to take refuge to platforms. Which is a pity, because all the work that's sunk into these endeavours would be much better spent on developing standards that lets people work with remote arrays through standard protocols.
An example for such standards was just presented here at ADASS: Pierre Fernique talked about “Big data exploration: a hierarchical visualisation solution for cubic surveys“. Check out his talk materials on the talk's ADASS page. In particular before you embark und building yet another platform.