Programme 2006

Speakers should aim at talks of 20-25 mins. The program then allows 5-10 mins for questions/discussion. Abstracts available here.

Sun 3 Dec
18h00Informal ice-breaker at Radissson Hotel, Cape Town Waterfront
Mon 4 Dec
08h30 - 09h00Registration at SAAO
09h00 - 09h30Welcome and logistics
Session 1 - Astronomical Results (chair: Tim Cornwell)
09h30 - 10h00Ger de Bruyn -  Full polarization wide field WSRT calibration/imaging at a million to one dynamic range
10h00 - 10h30Mike Garrett (JIVE), Emil Lenc (Swinburne), Seungyoup Chi (Kapteyn Institute/JIVE), Olaf Wucknitz (JIVE), Steve Tingay (Swinburne) et al. -  New Scientific results from wide-field VLBI
10h30 - 11h00Tea/Coffee?
Session 2 - Modelling and simulation (chair: Jasper Horrell)
11h00 - 11h30Rob Reid -  Automatic Model Construction in smerf
11h30 - 12h00Oleg Smirnov (ASTRON), Cormac Reynolds (JIVE) -  An Overview Of SKA Simulations Using MeqTrees
12h00 - 12h30Ronald Nijboer -  UVBricks: Predicting Patches of Sky and applying Image Plane Effects
12h30 - 13h30Lunch
Session 3 - Ionosphere (chair: Jan Noordam)
13h30 - 14h00Kumar Golap -  Implications of brute force solution to problems facing long wavelength long baselines interferometers
14h00 - 14h30Bill Cotton -  Ionospheric Calibration and Wide Field Imaging at 1 Metre Wavelength
14h30 - 15h00Sebastiaan van der Tol -  Ionospheric calibration from an array signal processing perspective
15h00 - 15h30Tea/Coffee?
Session 4 - Plans for some pathfinder telescopes (chair: Sanjay Bhatnagar)
15h30 - 16h00Bob Sault -  Imaging and calibration of the MWA-LFD
16h00 - 16h30Gerry R. Harp (SETI Institute) -  Wide-field imaging studies at the ATA
16h30 - 17h00Jan Noordam -  LOFAR Calibration Overview
18h30 - 22h00Workshop Dinner (Moyo at Spier)

Tues 5 Dec
Session 5 - Radio Frequency Interference (RFI)
09h00 - 09h30Richard Lord -  KAT RFI Environment and Preliminary Mitigation Strategies and Results
09h30 - 10h00V. N. Pandey, N. Udaya Shankar (Raman Research Institute, Bangalore, India) -  Hierarchical RFI Mitigation System at the Mauritius Radio Telescope
10h00 - 10h30Brian D. Jeffs, Karl F. Warnick and James Nagel -  On Interference Cancellation with a Focal Plane Array
10h30 - 11h00Tea/Coffee?
Session 6 - Focal Plane Arrays (FPA) and multi-feed arrays (MFA)
11h00 - 11h30 Tim Cornwell - Recent progress on xNTD and NTD
11h30 - 12h00 Maxim Voronkov - Calibration and simulation strategy for multi-feed interferometers
12h00 - 12h30 Stefan Wijnholds and Wim van Cappellen - FPA's for APERTIF
12h30 - 13h30Lunch
13h30 - 14h00 Mattieu de Villiers (SKA SA / KAT), Marianna Ivashina (ASTRON), Wim van Capellen et al. - Phased focal plane array modelling
Session 7 - Advanced imaging topics
14h00 - 14h30 Rau V. Urvashi and T.J. Cornwell - Multi-scale multi-frequency synthesis imaging
14h30 - 15h00 Rob Reid and Tony Willis - Correcting wide field image errors with complex primary beams
15h00 - 15h30Tea/Coffee?
15h30 - 16h00 Sanjay Bhatnagar - Parametrization of the Measurement Equation
Session 8 - Other
16h00 - 16h30 Stefan Wijnholds - Reducing the impact of station level spatial filtering limitations
16h30 - 17h00 Sarod Yatawatta - Subspace techniques for astronomical data enhancement
17h00 - 17h30 Jan Noordam and Casey Law - Detecting transient sources

Wed 6 Dec
09h00 - 09h30 Tony Willis and Oleg Smirnov - MeqTrees and Focal Plane Arrays
09h30 - 10h00 Sarod Yatawatta (Groningen/ASTRON) - Self-calibration using Shapelets and Friends
10h00 - 10h30 Daniel Mitchell (Harvard-Smithsonian) - Direction Dependent Beam Calibration for the MWA-LFD
10h30 - 11h00Tea/Coffee?
11h00 - 13h00Session 9 - Open questions, new techniques, SKA Cal and imaging white paper issues
[Richard Schilizzi - SKA Update]
13h00 - 14h00Wrap-up and Lunch

Thu 7 Dec & Fri 8 Dec
Focus Sessions - General in depth discussions
 Ger van Diepen - BBSelfCal overview
 Tim Cornwell - Sidelobes

Although the "official" workshop at the SAAO ends on Wed 6th, some people have expressed an interest in staying on for Thursday and Friday (7-8 Dec) for some unstructured brainstorming and "hands-on" work sessions in order to try out some ideas in small groups. This would most likely be based at the KAT offices in Lonsdale Road, Pinelands. People involved would need to bring their own laptops with software loaded, good ideas to try out, etc.