Star- and planet formation caught-in-the-act

Since the beginning of the last decade the analysis of huge amounts of data is a new challenge that researchers in general have to cope with. This is also true for astronomers and luckily the number of infrared facilities and the amount of data collected by them increased several order of magnitudes, leading us to new discoveries through data mining and knowledge discovery in databases using modern statistical methods, supervised and unsupervised machine learning. On-going surveys in other domains of the electromagnetic spectrum are providing us with a data avalanche at the moment and allow us to catch phenomena that we have never seen before. I present several methods that were efficiently used in YSO discoveries in large IR catalogues created based on data from IR space telescopes like AKARI, WISE and Herschel and that helped to identify eruptive young stars in the Gaia Photometric Science Alerts System and could be useful for future all-sky surveys, as well. Such YSO alerts can be potential targets for the JWST and can provide details about star and planet formation that we had no chance to capture before.