Welcome to the eBai Project   

Introduction
Astronomers are looking forward to enormous amounts of new observational data made possible by the increasing number of large ground-based telescopes and future satellites.  These vast data will provide tremendous opportunities for astrophysical research, but mining such data presents significant challenges; humans cannot look at all the data - we will have to rely on data reduction pipelines with sufficient intelligence to be proxies for us.  To develop and test these new methods for extracting astrophysical information from large datasets, the eBai project is focusing on the domain of variable stars with special emphasis on eclipsing binaries.  

Approach
The eBai Team is developing an automated Intelligent Data Pipeline (IDP) to identify variable stars, determine the period of variability (if periodic), classify the variability, and carry out further analyses for astrophysical data for selected types of variables, particularly eclipsing binaries.  The IDP will employ rulesets in determining how to direct the flow of data through the pipeline.  Certain modules, such as the classifier module which identifies the type of variability, will employ neural networks.  We will also employ a novel approach to light curve solutions for the identified eclipsing variables. 

The eBai Team welcomes Dr. Andrej Prsa, formerly of the University of Ljubjana's Department of Physics in Slovenia. Dr. Prsa has a wealth of knowledge and experience in programming and, specifically, in the field of automated reduction methods and is a welcome addition to the project. Dr. Prsa is the developer of PHOEBE, which is an extremely useful and powerful eclipsing binary modeling program which complements BinaryMaker, another eclipsing binary modeling program developed by eBai team member Dr. David Bradstreet of Eastern University. BinaryMaker (now in V3.0) was used to generate a grid of some 13000 eclipsing binary light curves for neural network "training" purposes. A subset of this model grid was processed by the network, with results shown in the second poster presentation on eBai presented at the American Astronomical Society June 2006 meeting in Calgary. The poster is also accessible via the navigation bar at left.