Modern astronomy depends on a highly distributed ecosystem of data archives, science platforms, high-performance computing facilities, observatories and international collaborations. Researchers routinely move between institutions, projects and services, while infrastructure providers must balance usability, security, accountability and interoperability. As a result, many astronomy communities face common challenges around persistent researcher identity, project-based access, governance, service interoperability and cross-organisational trust.

This Birds of a Feather session will explore how astronomy infrastructure can better support researchers operating across national and international environments. Drawing on recent Trust and Identity roadmap work undertaken within the Australian astronomy community, the session will examine recurring themes including researcher mobility, project and collaboration-based access models, federation, identity lifecycle management, and trust relationships between services and organisations.

It seems that at every conference time is set aside for discussions on diversity and inclusion. Many departments have a diversity committee and a diversity policy.
Why are we still devoting time to this? Shouldn't we be discussing algorithms, data transport, AI, and the current roadblocks to technical and scientific progress?

If you've been silently nodding, this BoF is for you.
If you are horrified at what you've just read, this BoF is for you.
If you think much of the DEIB effort is box ticking and virtue signalling, this BoF is for you.
If you believe that collaboration is the path to better science, please join us. Because the roadblocks to collaboration and diversity in our teams, are roadblocks to excellence in science and technology.

For a few years now, some astronomical data centers have observed an increasing number of incoming requests. This usually indicates that a service is becoming more popular and useful. However, the number and rate of these requests is so high that the services are becoming increasingly overwhelmed, ending up by a saturation and complete unavailability. Worryingly, this trend is speeding up. Consequently, services are becoming unavailable more often and more quickly than before.

The recently observed growth in activity actually hides a different user profile. Until now, humans and indexing crawlers were the only users of our services. Now, there is a new category of users: AI bots. Unlike the other users, they are much more aggressive. There are two main reasons for this. First, they rely on cloud infrastructures. This allows them to massively parallelize the web scrapping operations and use an enormous number of different IP addresses, making them impossible to block with the usual methods. Second, they do not adhere to any best practices, such as the well-known robots.txt, which indexing crawlers (search engines) read and follow.

Through this BoF, CDS (France), ESAC (Spain), and Data Central (Australia) aim to discuss beyond the negative impact of this recent practice on their infrastructures and explore strategies to maintain the high availability and quality of their services while allowing AI to reasonably interact with them. Everyone is welcome to join the discussion and share experiences, solutions (e.g. mirrors, proxy, authentication, ban with well-identified and shared IP ranges), and, more generally, ideas.