Dominik Winecki

Dominik Winecki, Arnab Nandi

Video data is increasingly used alongside conventional data for interactive data exploration, necessitating interfaces for exploring and presenting mixed-modality data. However, integrating video into visualizations remains difficult due to its distinct paradigms and inherent performance challenges. We identify three classes of video data visualization - synchronization, annotation, and transformation - and integrate them into the Vega declarative grammar. We show that these abstractions enable high-performance implementation. To reconcile Vega's instantaneous dataflow with video player state, we introduce a split-signal architecture that preserves declarative semantics while masking video update delays. We detect continuous scrubbing interactions at compile time to apply encoding-aware optimizations that improve responsiveness by up to 4x. We also repurpose VOD protocols to transform videos in real time, delivering sub-200ms updates even on multi-hour-long compilations. These contributions enable seamless integration of conventional and video data visualization.

Dominik Winecki, Christopher S. Kochanek

We use a multilevel perceptron (MLP) neural network to obtain photometry of saturated stars in the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN). The MLP can obtain fairly unbiased photometry for stars from g~4 to 14~mag, particularly compared to the dispersion (15%-85% 1sigma range around the median) of 0.12 mag for saturated (g<11.5 mag) stars. More importantly, the light curve of a non-variable saturated star has a median dispersion of only 0.037 mag. The MLP light curves are, in many cases, spectacularly better than those provided by the standard ASAS-SN pipelines. While the network was trained on g band data from only one of ASAS-SN's 20 cameras, initial experiments suggest that it can be used for any camera and the older ASAS-SN V band data as well. The dominant problems seem to be associated with correctable issues in the ASAS-SN data reduction pipeline for saturated stars more than the MLP itself. The method is publicly available as a light curve option on ASAS-SN Sky Patrol v1.0.