Dear friends,
In my previous newsletter, I described a forthcoming collaboration with citizen scientists to identify the most promising candidate signals in our data and build a labeled training set for a new machine learning application. This initiative is enabled in part by a grant from The Planetary Society (TPS). I also submitted a grant proposal to the NASA Citizen Science Seed Funding Program, which funds projects for a maximum duration of one year. This proposal received good reviews and was also selected for funding. I am thrilled that the combination of NASA and TPS funding will allow us to support the citizen science platform for an extended duration.
The seventh edition of the UCLA SETI course is in full swing. As usual, we have a combination of undergraduate and graduate students, but this year we have an unusually high concentration of astrophysics majors. Some of the astrophysics students are taking the SETI course to fulfill a degree requirement. We are now in week 8 of the 10-week quarter, and students are hard at work on their final projects. All 23 students in the class are tasked with (a) identifying a promising candidate technosignature among millions of signals detected by our data-processing pipeline, (b) identifying a previously unrecognized class of pervasive radio frequency interference (RFI), and (c) contributing software improvements to our pipeline, website, or citizen science platform. The software contributions are managed by a dozen small teams and shared on the GitHub platform.
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