About us

Alerce (Fitzroya cupressoides) is a tall, long-lived conifer native to southern Chile and Argentina. They are also known as lahuán (lawal in mapudungún), or Patagonian cypress. They can live up to 4000 years and reach up to 60 m in height.

Photo credit: Nick Hall photography

The Automatic Learning for the Rapid Classification of Events (ALeRCE) project

The ALeRCE broker is a Chilean-led broker which is processing the alert stream from the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) and which aims to become a Community Broker for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and its Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), as well as other large etendue survey telescopes. We are using Cloud Infrastructure and Machine Learning models to bring real-time processed products and services to the astronomical community.

ALeRCE is funded by the Millennium Institute for Astrophysics – MAS, the Center for Mathematical Modeling – CMM at Universidad de Chile, and since 2020 the Data Observatory, in collaboration with researchers from Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez – UAI, Universidad Austral de Chile – UACH (Informatics), Universidad Católica de Chile – UC (Astronomy), Universidad de Chile – UCH (Astronomy – DAS, Electrical Engineering – DIE), Universidad de Concepción – UdeC (Informatics), Universidad Nacional Andres Bello – UNAB (Astronomy), Universidad de Santiago de Chile – USACH (Statistics), Universidad Tecnológica Metropolitana – UTEM (Computer Science), Universidad de Valparaíso – UV (Astronomy), and REUNA in Chile, and international researchers from Caltech and Harvard U. and U. of Washington.

ALeRCE users

The geographic distribution of users of the ALeRCE Explorer according to Google Analytics, which is estimated counting the unique combinations of device & browser accessing our website. We have users from 139 different countries accessing the ALeRCE Explorer.

People

Director

Guillermo Cabrera-Vives (UdeC, MAS)

Scientific Board

  • Franz Bauer (UTA, MAS)
  • Amelia Bayo (ESO)
  • Guillermo Cabrera-Vives (UdeC, MAS)
  • Márcio Catelan (UC, MAS)
  • Pablo Estévez (UCH/DIE, MAS)
  • Susana Eyheramendy (UAI, MAS)
  • Francisco Förster (UCH/IDIA-CMM, MAS)
  • Giuliano Pignata (UTA, MAS)
  • Paula Sánchez-Sáez (ESO)

Strategic Board

  • Guillermo Cabrera-Vives (UdeC, MAS)
  • Francisco Förster (UCH/IDIA-CMM, MAS)
  • Eduardo Vera (UCH/CMM)
  • Rodrigo Roa (DO, UAI)
  • Andrea Rodríguez (UdeC)

Other Faculty

  • Patricia Arévalo (UV, MAS)
  • Jura Borissova (UV, MAS)
  • Alejandro Clocchiatti (UC, MAS)
  • Felipe Elorrieta (USACH, MAS)
  • César Fuentes (UCH, MAS)
  • Radostin Kurtev (UV, MAS)
  • Paulina Lira (UCH, DAS)
  • Gonzalo Rojas (UdeC)
  • Jorge Vergara (UTEM, MAS)

Postdocs

  • Raya Dastidar (MAS)
  • Lorena Hernández (MAS, UV)
  • Alejandra Muñoz-Arancibia (MAS, CMM)

QA analyst

Alejandra Muñoz-Arancibia (MAS, CMM)

Engineers

Lead engineer:

Ignacio Reyes (DO)

 

Full time engineers:

  • Alex Álvarez (UCH/CMM)
  • Francisco Andrades (MAS)
  • Claudio Mansilla (CMM/MAS)
  • Erick Muñoz (UdeC)
  • Héctor Larragaña (MAS)
  • Kay Medina (MAS)

Admin

Bárbara Vallejos (MAS)

Hackathons/Meetings

Puerto Varas, Chile (Aug 19th, 2022)

Santiago, Chile (September 7th, 2021)

First ALeRCE tutorial (September 23-24th, 2020).

Concepción, Chile (January 2020)

Santiago, Chile (June 2019)

La Serena, Chile (March 2019)

Valdivia, Chile, November 2018

Contact