This one-year project is to enable the participation of students and junior researchers from the USA at the Seventh Workshop on Solar Information Processing. The conference will be held on August 18-21, 2014, in La Roche-en- Ardenne, Belgium. This conference is aimed at cultivating a forum, where experts from the disciplines of space physics and information science (scientific computing, statistics, signal processing, and visualization) gather to identify fundamental open questions in solar-terrestrial physics that are particularly suited to be addressed through novel cyber-enabled approaches to scientific exploration. The conference will address issues such as: (i) coronal heating and the statistical inference on power law indices; (ii) solar dynamo and the extraction of signatures of physical processes from data; and, (iii) space weather forecasting and the necessary combination of physics-based simulations and multi-modal observations to achieve meaningful prediction. It will also tackle the data analysis challenges brought by the upcoming Solar Orbiter and Solar Probe Plus missions. Coordinated exploitation of these heterogeneous datasets requires expertise at the confluence of space physics, computational imaging, time series analysis, and information processing.
One of the most important aspects of the conference is to ensure a significant student participation worldwide. As a way to foster communication between solar physics and information processing communities and in order to provide adequate training in both fields, invited speakers from both the solar physics and information processing fields will jointly address particular topics of mutual scientific interest. A special issue in a refereed journal is also planned to ensure broad dissemination of the conference results. This project supports the Strategic Goals of the AGS Division in discovery, learning, diversity, and interdisciplinary research.
