Dear friends,
Early results from our SETI citizen science platform have come in. Our platform is undergoing the required project review in order to become an official Zooniverse project. As part of this review, beta testers exercise the platform and submit feedback. The response has been impressive, with more than 3,000 image classifications by 100+ volunteers in the first 24 hours. We are experiencing the power of citizen science firsthand and it is a thrill! Ultimately, we hope to collaborate with a large and diverse set of SETI enthusiasts to classify 20,000–100,000 images, identify the most promising technosignature candidates in our data, and generate a labeled training set for our next machine learning application (see Oct. 25, 2021 newsletter to learn how we currently use machine learning in our search). The beta test is expected to last one week, after which we may receive additional feedback from the Zooniverse team. We are eager to incorporate the feedback and launch the citizen science collaboration in early 2023 with our funding partners at NASA and The Planetary Society. UCLA graduate student Megan Li will describe the citizen science platform, science objectives, and anticipated results during her talk at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Seattle, WA on January 12, 2023. I will speak in the same session about our latest search results, including the analysis of our Spring 2022 data.
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