Present:

• Ramesh Bhat
• Sammy McSweeney
• Nick Swainston
• Susmita Sett
• Isaac Colleran
• Willem van Straten
• Shi Dai
• Ryan Shannon
• Ian Morrison
• Mengyao Xue
• Marcin Sokolowski

Agenda:

1. Overview and general updates (Ramesh)
2. Processing updates + candidate scrutiny (Nick)
3. MWAX and commissioning plans (Sammy)
4. ML testing and integration plans (Isaac)
5. Update on papers in prep. (Ramesh/Sammy) 
6. Publication policy discussion (all) 
7. Discussion time (all) 

Minutes:

• Ramesh: Overview
• Nothing has changed in terms of observings
• ...because MWA is still undergoing upgrade
• Science commissioning tasks are imminent
• Then SMART survey will continue, while still in compact config
• PSR #3: J1002-2036
• Found using “SMART”er (har har) candidate sifting process, including clustering algorithms that take advantage of complex tied-array beam (for compact config)
• First estimate: ~10 mJy, possibly steep spectrum
• 30-sigma detection over 80 mins
• PSR #2: J0026-1955
• Active proposals at Parkes and GMRT for follow-up
• Various issues with localisation
• Parkes (P1134) followup: Shi managed to pull a detection out of a magic hat, where Ramesh and Nick both had trouble. Found in 2nd harmonic.
• GMRT Cycle 41 followup: TAC suggested trying full polarimetry. Requires a bit more overhead for calibration, but is an acceptable risk, so we will go for it.
• Nulling makes confirmation of source seen in GMRT image a little less straightforward, so we are taking conservative approach.
• Observation campaign starting soon!
• Flux of candidate GMRT source suggests possibly steep spectrum source!
• Priorities
• Papers (Nick’s, Sam’s, Ramesh’s) all underway
• Commissioning the new system
• Continue SMART observing as soon as system allows!
• Continue processing and candidate searching (= “pulsar hunting”)
• Discussion:
• WvS: offers generic help, e.g. for subpulse drifting analysis, polarimetric calibration
• SM: I might reach out about MWA polarimetry
• Ramesh: GMRT polarimetric is also new, so might need extra help/advice with that.
• RS: phase-connected timing solution for PSR #2?
• Ramesh: Not yet. This is the main objective for Parkes followup data.
• RS: I can help with that.
• SD: RFI was really bad, so careful cleaning might help with higher frequencies. Optimistic about timing.
• Nick’s update:
• Full 80-minute detection shown for PSR #3
• Not yet found in other obs, but still have other compact config observations to process
• It was found by exploiting compact config tied-array beam pattern, with its grating lobes
• Introduced some smarts to eliminate large number of known pulsar detections by flagging candidates coincident in DM and in nearby tied-array beams
• A few more obs searched, processing is chugging along
• Ramesh: Will be re-applying for supercompute (round is open now, closes in a couple of weeks). Should still be well justified for the next couple of quarters.
• Nick concurs
• Ramesh: We will ask for a similar request as last time.
• Sam’s update:
• (Will fill in later)
• Isaac’s update:
• Showing results for trained networks. ~85% accuracy (on average, across networks).
• SGAN best model even better
• Possibly even better than that because some candidates in validation set were incorrectly labelled.
• Will be implementing trained network into SMART pipeline.
• SD: What is F1-score?
• IC: Just one of many metrics.
• Paper updates:
• Discussion:
• WvS: Recall might be most important metric for ML
• WvS: van Leeuwin 0809 (reference to PSR #2)
• WvS: Looking forward to polarimetry on PSR #2
• SD: Can all SMART detections be detected in continuum imaging? Would be interesting to get spectrum.
• RB: Should be possible for subset of pulsars. Susmita has a “golden” image used for testing this kind of thing. Short answer, ~0.5 of pulsars might be able to see in imaging.
• MS: compact vs extended configuration will make a difference!
• RB: GMRT probably still best way to get positions