Casey Law edited accomplishments.tex  about 10 years ago

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With our first terabyte of data on disk, we began to think seriously about algorithms for efficiently searching for radio transients. The traditional data analysis systems required human interaction at every stage. This approach was not feasible when analyzing many millions of images. Our solution was a novel statistical test that automatically found transient candidates; the number of candidate events was small enough to be manually inspected by a person (Law et al. 2012, Astrophysical Journal, 749, 7). This algorithm is now being tested at new, powerful radio interferometers under construction around the world.  Based on that success, I began collaborating with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory to develop the world's most powerful radio interferometer, the Very Large Array (VLA), for millisecond imaging. After a 3-month residency project, our team unveiled its first fruits: the first blind detection of a millisecond radio transient (See \url{http://goo.gl/bx0L39}; Figure \ref{rratimg};  Law et al. 2012, Astrophysical Journal, 760, 6). This transient was a rare kind of neutron star that pulses sporadically and has traditionally been studied by large, single-dish radio telescopes. By using an interferometer, we precisely localized the neutron star and could search for counterparts in optical surveys. The lack of an optical counterpart gave us insight into how the neutron star formed. We have continued to develop the VLA for millisecond imaging and now routinely use it to observe at data rates of 300 MB s$^{-1}$ or 1 TB hour$^{-1}$. My software now incorporates new algorithms for high throughput radio transient searches and is run on compute clusters. I am leading a collaboration to search tens of terabytes of data using clusters at the VLA, at Los Alamos National Lab, and National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC).