Second ECLAT hackathon and General Assembly
From 2 to 6 June 2025, the ECLAT laboratory brought its community together in a unique setting, the Kerazan manor in Loctudy, for an intense week of exchanges, innovation and collective reflection on one of the major challenges facing astronomy in the future: the deluge of data.
A week of science, coding and discussions at Manoir de Kerazan!
Le Hackathon
For five days, around twenty scientists, developers and engineers worked together to make concrete progress on SKAO’s future software tools. Key results:
✅ Seamless integration of radio beam functions (particularly for hashtag#SKAO) into processing chains – a key step ahead of the arrival of the first data
✅ Accelerated development of various hashtag#GPU modules, particularly ‘gridding’ and deconvolution functions
✅ A promising prototype of the Holoscan application (NVIDIA)
The General Assembly
The ECLAT General Assembly provided an opportunity to review strategic priorities through roundtable discussions, particularly in the field of AI for astronomical instrumentation. Among the priorities that emerged were:
✅ Natural language queries using LLMs in the DDFacet pipeline to facilitate accessibility
✅ Using data from the NenuFAR radio telescope in Nançay to test AI prototypes
The open lecture
Damien Gratadour’s lecture attracted more than 80 participants, including citizens, curious minds and science enthusiasts, around the theme: ‘The challenges of the hashtag#astronomy of the hashtag#future: looking further ahead, thinking more sustainably’. The discussions were rich and stimulating, focusing in particular on the environmental issues related to large scientific infrastructures.
This week marks an important milestone for ECLAT. This type of gathering, combining science, technology and open dialogue with the public, fully embodies ECLAT’s mission: to advance science in a collective, open and responsible manner.
