PhD position in Computer-aided Analysis of Radio Astronomy Data

How do we deal with very large data sets of high resolution images, in particular in the field of radio astronomy? This question encompasses the scope of a joint PhD project between the University of Groningen (The Netherlands), the University of Stellenbosch (South Africa), and ASTRON, which is the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy. Modern radio telescopes typically consist of 100 to a few hundred receiving elements, whose signals are pairwise correlated producing tens of thousands correlations for tens of thousands of frequency channels simultaneously. For a system like the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) this produces a data deluge of 1 TByte/s. This data may be affected by man-made radio frequency interference (RFI), instrumental failures and other effects that make the data unsuitable for scientific analysis.