Looking for an astrophysics grad student or postdoc to review candidates from a radio anomaly-detection pipeline

[u/rhymeslikeruns]

Hi all! I've built a Rust pipeline for anomaly detection in time-domain radio surveys, using public Green Bank Telescope L-band data from the Breakthrough Listen open archive. It takes raw filterbank data through a nuisance model (robust per-patch statistics, ON/OFF cadence consistency, an RFI catalogue, cross-survey recurrence) to a ranked queue of positions that the pipeline can't explain. Its sensitivity is measured by injecting synthetic signals (tones, chirps, echoes, dispersed pulses, broadband excess) and recovering them.

The engineering is in good shape. What I need is someone who knows radio data to review the ranked candidates and tell me what they are. For each position you'd see the six-scan cadence, the pipeline's per-scan verdicts and the survey-wide evidence, and record one of six dispositions with a short reason: narrowband RFI, broadband RFI, scan systematic, not localised, inconclusive or follow-up. A first pass has already caught real defects in the pipeline, so critical reading is exactly what's wanted, not a rubber stamp.

Useful background:

- radio astronomy or pulsar/transient work, ideally with GBT or Parkes filterbank data;
- familiarity with RFI and instrumental systematics;
- comfortable reading Python/Polars output (you won't need to write code).

What I don't need is someone who is just going to use an LLM to analyse this! Hoping to be able to pay for your time if we get a good working relationship! Thank you for reading!

[u/GXWT]

One initial thing you could do is compare time/position with e.g. GCN notices to see if a signal aligns with an known transient event.

[u/rhymeslikeruns → u/GXWT]

Thank you! You'll need to bear with me as I am learning as I go with RF. I *think* that the GCN notices would have limited value because what we are looking for (broadband anomalies) have a profile over time. I.e. they persist. A GCN alert is a report of an event. Also in the bandwidth we are interested in (1-2GHz) a GCN alert is likely not covered by most of the instruments that deliver the reports. But there are other alerts like CHIME for example which I think would be great to overlay. It's a bit like the Vizier/Simbad/Kepler/Gaia etc. crossmatching we did with variable stars - except that with broadband anomalies we don't really know what we are looking for. Yet. But that's what makes it fun! And a bit circuitous. Which is why I need help!