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An orchestra where musicians play in different cities, and the conductor hears them with a fraction-of-a-second delay. That's roughly how radio telescope networks like the Very Long Baseline Array work — a dozen antennas from Hawaii to the Virgin Islands catch the whispers of distant galaxies. To assemble a single image from disparate recordings, you need to synchronize the signals perfectly — accounting for air humidity, atmospheric jitter, and off-kilter clocks. For decades, humans did this calibration, spending hours on each object. For the SMILE project, which requires processing about 5000 sources, this approach became a bottleneck.

AVICA, the new tool, takes on the role of a patient sound engineer. It opens archival files recorded in different formats over 30 years and finds the reference tone on its own — a bright spot in the sky against which all antennas can be aligned. Like a piano tuner, the algorithm catches the beating of signals (interference fringes) and picks the cleanest note. Then the program automatically applies a chain of corrections, turning raw data into a finished image. The whole process for one object takes about 30 minutes on a standard server.

Behind the scenes, the ALFRD system conducts the work: it launches tasks, monitors progress, and logs results in real time. This approach has for the first time allowed a giant archive of very long baseline interferometry data to be fully automatically processed without any manual calibration. In the future, AVICA's ability to choose reference signals on its own will be included in the public rPICARD package, and any radio telescope will be able to work blind, without a human at the controls. The orchestra has finally learned to play in harmony by itself.