Exploring the Unknown with Radio Surveys: A Celebration of the Career of Ray Norris

This scientific conference will be held to celebrate the career of Prof Ray Norris. Ray moved to Australia to help build and commission the CSIRO Australia Telescope Compact Array and in the last 40 years has had a huge impact on Australian radio astronomy as well as Indigenous and Cultural astronomy. While this conference will include some reflections on Ray’s career it will very much be a scientific conference based around the following themes:

• History and Future of Large Australian radio surveys
  • From ATCA to ASKAP Australia has long been home to radio surveys probing the southern sky – all of which Ray has played a major part in. As well as a historic overview we invite talks presenting the latest results from continuum radio surveys including early results from the Evolutionary Map of the Universe survey. We also solicit talks on novel discoveries from or novel uses of radio continuum surveys.
• Active Galactic Nuclei and Galaxy Evolution
  • Since his PhD Ray has been interested in AGN and how they impact galaxy evolution. We invite talks in this area particularly on the radio perspective of powerful AGN and star-forming galaxies (i.e. LIRGs and ULIRGs).
• Machine learning, big data and citizen science
  • In the era of petabyte and terabyte data sets, Ray has championed the use of advanced techniques such as machine learning and citizen science to allow current astronomers to adequately exploit such data sets. We invite talks demonstrating such techniques on current and future large scale astronomical surveys.
• Indigenous and Cultural Astronomy
  • Indigenous astronomy in Australia as an area of serious research was initiated by Ray and other colleagues over recent decades. We invite talks on highlights and the latest research from studies of Indigenous and Cultural astronomy in Australia and from around the world.

Conference webpage

https://www.atnf.csiro.au/research/conferences/2023/RayFest/index.php