User Stories Unread
User Stories (Unread)
This page keeps a list of newly contributed User Stories for CIRADA.
If you are a member of the astronomical community and would like to add a User Story, please submit your story here.
Each story is a description of how an end-user wants to gain value from the products that CIRADA will be delivering. Not all stories appearing on this page will be satisfied as part of CIRADA. They will be vetted and ranked by the appropriate people/groups for potential work.
A user story is typically written in the form:
As a <role>, I want to <desire>, so that <benefit>.
Examples
Here are a couple non-CIRADA examples:
| ID | Story | Author |
|---|---|---|
| USEXAMP.1 | As a project team member, I want to access all project-related documents in one place, so that I don't have to search multiple sources or look through my old emails to find a document. This feature would save me so much time when I'm preparing for a meeting or looking for a quick answer to a question I might have while I'm working. | Lost Lenny |
| USEXAMP.2 | As a concerned parent who likes to track her teenager's location, I want to know the current battery life of my child's phone, so that I know approximately how much time she has left to receive or send messages before her phone dies. GPS-tracking is great, but this new feature would be a great add-on to my monitoring. Our family just went through an episode where this feature would've been very helpful. | Nosy Nancy |
| USEXAMP.3 | As a Dunlap events coordinator, I want a more digital and autonomous way for our volunteers/speakers/attendees to register for our Astronomy on Tap events, so that the events are more organized and can attract more people. | Coordinator Chris |
More templates and examples can be found here.
Note that a user story does not give specifics around how a user would interact with the software/hardware or which technologies should be used. Once certain user stories have been deemed worthwhile to pursue for CIRADA, the time and effort put into creating detailed Use Cases will be invested. A general description of the differences between a user story and a use case can be found here.
Submission Form
Submitted Stories
| ID | Story | Author |
|---|---|---|
| USGEN.NEW.1 | For a remote database, I want to make bivariate plots of the values in columns of a table. For example, if we stored the VLASS component database, I'd like to plot two columns (say, flux vs spectral index) based on selecting these variables from a list. I'd like this plot to be pan / zoomable. The plotting should be efficient for large tables using fast visualization methods (such as the approaches in https://vaex.io) to visualize databases with >10^7 elements. The plots should be density plots where plotting symbols are crowded in the space. The visualization should have autoclipping functionality, to restrict the box to the central 95, 99.5, 99.9 % of the data and also be able to plot log or symlog axes (https://matplotlib.org/3.1.0/gallery/scales/symlog_demo.html#sphx-glr-gallery-scales-symlog-demo-py). | Erik R |
| USGEN.NEW.2 | I'd also like to create 1D histograms of individual variables and make 1D selections in that space. Like the bivariate plots / histograms, I'd like to be able to pan and zoom within the histogram. There are other plot styles that make sense here but these 1D and 2D plots are the easiest things to make selections in. | Erik R |
| USGEN.NEW.3 | Within those plots, I'd like to be able to select elements from the database graphically, by drawing a region of interest (box, circle, polygon) or even selecting individual data. | Erik R |
| USGEN.NEW.4 | I'd like to have multiple instances of these plots together on one canvas where the visualizations are linked. To extend the VLASS use case above, I'd like to plot the flux vs spectral index in one plot and a declination distribution as a histogram and make selections in either window that highlight those selections in other windows following the linked visualization approach used in topcat or glue (glueviz.org). The selections should also link to a table view of the catalog data. | Erik R |
| USGEN.NEW.5 | I'd like for these selections in linked visualizations to filter the table so that only specific rows are part of my sample. I'd then like to export components that fit those criteria. | Erik R |
| USGEN.NEW.6 | For catalog tables, I'd like to be able to visualize the catalog overlaid on images. I'd like for this image visualization to be interactive and fully featured, so I can pan, zoom, adjust colour scale, perform image statistics, etc. | Erik R |
| USGEN.NEW.7 | I would like for this image data exploration to allow for "small multiples" views of images associated with catalogue objects. To make this more concrete, I'd like to select, for example, all the extended radio galaxies in the CIRADA VLASS database and show images of each of those regions. These can be postage stamps stored in the database, but ideally these would also be able to be interactive visualizations of the sky (where interactive is what's described in 6 above. | Erik R |
| USGEN.NEW.8 | As a crazy stretch goal, I'd also like to make a selection in the table, display ~20 postage stamps around catalog objects associated with that selection. From that group, I'd like to select images that I care about from the list. I'd like my selections to train a machine learning method that allows me to press a "More like this" button and get all the objects in the catalog that fit with my training. | Erik R |
| USGEN.NEW.9 | I'd like for this to operate on a remote server running CIRADA services, where we can make the selections using the query application running in a server through a remote browser. | Erik R |
| USGEN.NEW.10 | As an astronomer, I want to study the relationship between the optical structure (in multiple colors) of the host galaxy and the very high resolution structure from VLASS (jet interactions, etc). The optical images should be visible both in their original form and with some smooth model subtracted in order to see the fine structure. On larger scales, I would like to do the same kind of comparison between radio and X-ray images. | Larry Rudnick |
| USGEN.NEW.11 | As a radio astronomer, I want to make very high dynamic range images without the apparent smearing out that appears when you look at logarithmic greyscales. I would like to choose from a selection of color scales that are optimized for this purpose. | Larry Rudnick |
| USCON.NEW.1 | As an AGN scientist, I want to determine the AGN duty cycle. This has implications on the duration of accretion events for various environments. Of particular interest may be AGN hosted by BCGs. This will require Accurate flux density measurements across a range of frequencies (ex. 100 MHz - 10 GHz), the coverage should be as uniform as possible; Matched UV coverage; Optical IDs of host galaxy, optical spectra also needed for ascertaining the current state of activity as well as determining its relevant properties. | Aleksander Shulevski (U of Amsterdam) |
| USCON.NEW.2 | As a cosmologist working on large-scale structure surveys using the 21 cm line in neutral hydrogen (CHIME), I want to use VLASS to subtract confused point sources from our maps since these sources constitute one of the primary foregrounds for our survey. This would also be helpful for modeling backgrounds when calibrating. Doing this requires accurate spectral characterizations of the sources such that their spectrum can be extrapolated to 400 to 800 MHz, as well as polarization and Faraday rotation measurements such that the polarized instrumental response can be well determined. | Kiyoshi Masui (MIT) |
| USCON.NEW.3 | I want to map the spectral index gradients of extended radio sources. Exploiting the resolution of VLASS will, in particular, allow for the mapping of steep-spectrum emission on kpc-scales around flat-spectrum sources which will generally be only marginally resolved. | Larry Rudnick |
| USCON.NEW.4 | As a radio astronomer, I want to make sure of diffuse low surface brightness emission from a variety of different objects. These include faint lobes of radio galaxies and tails that will be useful for source identification and morphological classification, a variety of galactic sources such as HII regions and SNRs, and lower redshift star forming galaxies. | Larry Rudnick |
| USCON.NEW.5 | As a radio astronomer, I want to create a sample of (confirmed or possible) tailed radio galaxies for further study. To do this, I would need a morphological classification in the catalog, with an identified host and spectral information consistent with the tailed structure. | Larry Rudnick |
| USCON.NEW.6 |
| USTRAN.NEW.1 | As a transient astronomer, I would like to be notified by email/sms/slack when new alerts are received from CIRADA telescopes. | Casey Law |
| USTRAN.NEW.2 | As a transient astronomer, I would like a tool that predicts a likely source classification for a transient based on its cross-matching with multi-wavelength counterparts identified in archival data so that a suitable follow-up strategy may be devised. | Akshay Suresh (Cornell) |
| USPULS.NEW.1 | As a pulsar astronomer, I would like a downloadable list of probable detections with location (RA, DEC), DM, best-guess phase model, statistical certainty of detection, and uncertainties on these parameters. I would also appreciate a summary of relevant internal search parameters, e.g. how many days of data contributed to a particular detection. It would be great if these data had a public web interface. I would use this information to perform follow-up timing observations, as well as generate population estimates. | Alex Roman |
| USPULS.NEW.2 | As a researcher interested in pulsars, I want to discover new many new radio pulsars so that we can constrain the maximum electron column density in the Galaxy, study the radio pulsar population itself, and find particularly unusual pulsars like binaries and magnetars. | Vicky Kaspi |
| USPULS.NEW.3 | As a researcher associated with CHIME, I want to provide the community with the data required to search for pulsars in particular sky locations, to broaden the scientific utility of the CIRADA slow pulsar search and CHIME overall. | Vicky Kaspi |
| USPULS.NEW.4 | As a multiwavelength astronomer with a new transient or binary source, I would like to see if the CHIME instrument has even a low-significance indication of a radio pulsar signal at the position of my new object. | Ingrid Stairs |
| USPULS.NEW.5 |
| USABSORB.NEW.1 | As a cosmologist, I want more blind searched 21cm absorption systems discovered in order that the spacial distributions and physical properties of those neutral hydrogen clouds can be better understood, and these potentially helps in directly measuring the acceleration of the universe and dark energy. | Haoran Yu |
| USABSORB.NEW.2 | Damped Lyman Alpha systems (DLAs) are the richest reservoirs of neutral hydrogen known in the early universe. First characterised in the early 1970s due to their distinct ‘damping wing’ features in quasar absorption line spectra, DLAs have formed the basis for numerous spectroscopic studies with over 30,000 systems identified in optical surveys so far. At late times, DLAs have been associated with star forming galaxies, however, at very early times, the nature of DLA hosts still remains a mystery. The presence of the bright background quasar makes direct imaging of DLA galaxies difficult, thus limiting their identification with follow-up surveys. Various models that explain the nature of DLA hosts have been proposed, ranging from Milky-Way type spiral disk galaxies to more compact, faint dwarf progenitors of galaxies. Recently, the clustering of these systems has been measured, finding them to be situated in much larger hosts than expected from other data. We propose to identify several DLA analogs in 21 cm spectra obtained with CHIME, that circumvent the difficulty of a bright quasar source in the background. This will enable us to probe the nature of DLA host galaxies, and pave the way towards resolving outstanding questions about their origin. | Hamsa Padmanabhan |