Overview | Venue

The Exoplanet Imaging Workshop will be held 25-30 March 2012 at the Resort at Squaw Creek, California.

The primary goal of the workshop is to improve detection of exoplanets as imaged with AO-corrected ground-based coronagraphs by creating a rigorous mathematical formulation of the problem of planet detection. The emphasis will be on exploring improvements to end-to-end modeling of coronagraphs, including sources of noise and bias in measurements and the exploitation of speckle statistics in AO-corrected systems. We expect to cover the majority, if not entirety, of your travel expenses.

This working meeting is being limited to 15 invited participants, bringing together experts in statistical detection/estimation theory as well as those with hands-on experience with ground-based coronagraph data and optical systems. This will include theoreticians from the University of Arizona, the University of Galway, and researchers from the Gemini Planet Imager, VLT-SPHERE, Palomar P1640, and Subaru SCExAO.

A particular interest is to explore how state-of-the art methods of detection used in medicine and radiology, such as the Hotelling and ideal observer, might be applied to the detection of exoplanets and to treating data cubes derived from modern Integral Field Spectrographs.

The workshop format will involve tutorials from the several disciplines with the hopes of fostering collaboration that would lead to new advances in research. We plan to edit an SPIE paper to summarize results from the discussions at the workshop.

We have chosen dates that allow workshop participants to extend their stays at the resort either before or after the meeting. If that time is used to continue work in support of the meeting, we will endeavor to cover it from project funds.

Funding for this workshop has been provided by the Keck Futures Initiative as explained in:

http://www.keckfutures.org/conferences/imaging-science/grantees.html

The funds were granted to us as a result of our involvement in the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative Conference on Imaging Science, held in Irvine California, in November 2010. The final presentation of our group at that meeting, was presented by Lisa Poyneer.

Richard Frazin (PI)
Peter Lawson (Co-PI)