An Update from Jill Tarter
I’m recently back from Australia where I visited the Parkes radio telescope (I had lived there for 6 months, while observing in 1995) that you may be familiar with from the charming movie ‘The Dish‘. That movie tells the story of how the Parkes radio telescope ended up delivering to the waiting world the first televised images from the Apollo 11 landing. The occasion was the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the lunar landing and thousands of people visited the observatory to take a walking tour of the dish and learn about the astronomical research it is used for today.
I also spent 4 days in Sydney, lecturing to the Harry Messel International Science School (probably the brightest group of high school students on our planet), and updating the media on the Allen Telescope Array. At the Sydney Ideas Lecture I talked about extremophiles and exoplanets on the anniversary of the lunar landing. My media and lecture audiences down under didn’t know a lot about TED, and it was an enjoyable challenge to explain who TEDsters are and that they are actually trying to help fulfill my personal wish to change the world – there’s nothing to compare with such a group in Oz or anywhere in the world! In contrast, one person who is very aware of TED and its activities is Kia Silverbrook who runs Silverbrook Research in the Sydney district of Balmain. Kia’s group is about to market a revolutionary new ink jet printer and he’s got lots of clever physicists and engineers working at his labs. My husband Jack Welch and I gave Kia’s employees a talk about the ATA, the radio science and the SETI search programs it will accomplish, and Jack’s efforts to extend the ATA feed and receiver to higher frequencies. To do that last trick means reliably and inexpensively manufacturing bits and pieces at much smaller scales than we do presently. Sliverbrook Research does miniaturization really well, and several of the staff seem interested to help with our challenges.
My TED wish is beginning to take on a more concrete status. Infosys Technologies in Bangalore is helping us clean up our signal detection software, so that we can publish it as open source code. GitHub is hosting our open source development efforts and providing required repositories. We’ve made initial inquiries about donations of a commodity cluster for the ATA to run the detection software in real time. We’ve also talked to cloud resource providers about donating the storage and computational resources necessary to host about a day’s worth of raw SETI data (~40 TB) each month to enable contests to develop new signal detection algorithms that can effectively find weak, higher dimensional signals that we now miss, and to enable other contests to make those algorithms fast enough to keep up on the telescope in real-time. Finally, we are investigating a real-time visual parsing effort that might allow eyeballs around the planet to help us find complex signals in noise – signals that no algorithms can yet detect. In June, we held a workshop at the SETI Institute with attendees from TED, the visualization, gaming, and social network communities. There are a whole lot of challenges, but something enjoyable, rewarding, and incredibly useful may come out of this work.
