Newton STFC-NARIT: Using astronomy surveys to train Thai researchers in Big Data analysis

The most effective way of reducing levels of poverty in developing countries is through their continued economic growth, which leads to increased levels of income per person. To remain competitive, however, a developing economy needs access to a workforce with increasingly sophisticated skills. For Thailand today, this means skills that enable innovation, allowing it to compete against other developing and developed economies. With more and more sectors collecting data on their customers, production lines, distribution networks, stock prices, etc., one of the most crucially needed of these "high-level" skills is the ability to handle large amounts of digital data. However, as present, Thai students lack ready access to very large datasets, which prevents their training in this area. Our project addresses this problem by combining the resources and experience of UK astronomers of very large datasets, with the skills of Thai Data Scientists in digital data analysis. Through this collaboration, the Thai students will gain access to a vast amounts of digital data in the form of astronomical surveys. Working under the supervision of the Thai and UK partners, the students will develop software that will automatically analyse this data and, in doing so, gain important experience in handling vast quantities of digital data. Furthermore, the software resulting from the students' research will form an important component of the pipeline used to process data from a new telescope being developed by UK astronomers, and will thus directly benefit UK science. On completion of the project, the skills acquired by the Thai students will be readily transferrable to a diverse range of economic sectors such as information technology, medicine, finance, security, etc., thereby helping the further economic development of Thailand.

The immediate beneficiaries of this research will be the Thai graduate students who will receive training in high-level data handling skills while conducting their research project. Following the project, these students will be able to apply these skills within a diverse range of growth sectors, such as finance, medicine, logistics, information technology etc. In doing so, they will benefit the wider Thai economy by helping grow and compete internationally through innovation.

Secondary beneficiaries will be the scientists and astronomers who are involved in GOTO and NARIT. By developing software to automatically analyse large amounts of digital data, the outcome of the students' research may play an important role in extracting information from GOTO and NARIT's facilities. In the latter case, this could be in the form of automatically analysing data taken by the network of Thai Robotic Telescope distributed across Thailand and in Chile. This has the prospect of making the data more accessible to students, schoolchildren and the general public, thereby encouraging their interest in astronomy.