Paul Rosen along with Bei Wang (University of Utah), Chris Johnson (University of Utah), Jeff Kern (NRAO), and Betsy Mills (NRAO) received a 1-year ALMA Development Project grant from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory for $185k. The grant is titled "Feature Extraction and Visualization of AMLA Data Cubes through Topological Data Analysis".
The project is a feasibility study for applying forms of data analysis and visualization never before tested by the ALMA community. Through contour tree-based Topological Data Analysis, we seek to improve upon existing data cube analysis and visualization. This will come in the form of improved accuracy and speed in finding features, which are robust to noise, and a better visual description of features once identified. We will build prototype software, which creates visualizations that help in characterizing and analyzing the spectra of complex spectral line sources within a given data cube.