Jack was born and raised in Kailua, Hawaii. He went to the mainland for college and goes to Lewis and Clark college in Oregon. Jack has always been interested in programming and computers and is a Computer Science and Mathematics Major. Jack enjoys video games/board games as well as reading sci-fi books. He hopes to get more experience in the field and get a job involving programming of some kind preferably software engineering.

Home Island: Oahu

Institution when accepted: Lewis and Clark College

Akamai Project: YTLA Database Retrieval and Visualization Web Application

Project Site: Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics – Hilo, Hawai’i Island HI

Mentors: Ranjani Srinivasan

Project Abstract:

The Yuan Tseh Lee Array (YTLA) is a radio interferometer, which means it has multiple signal pathways whose operational parameters need to be tracked to ensure that their performance is optimal. The gap that I am trying to fill in operations, is the lack of aforementioned data access from the YTLA logs. The project seeks to display datastreams originating from the telescope and present them as interactive timeseries graphs that can be changed depending on the parameters selected and are displayed on a webpage that any ASIAA staff can use. I created a software suite using python that can extract, parse and plot data quickly and effectively. In addition to creating the framework, I implemented ease of access which includes an easy to understand user interface, text documents with complete accompanying documentation where new variables and notes can be inserted and immediately displayed on the webpage. This eliminates the need for astronomers to search through the actual code when they decide to track/add a new variable. I essentially created a new piece of software that allows ASIAA to quickly retrieve data from the telescope remotely via web access and the capability of easily modifying variables and notes without having any coding experience.