Alien life is out there. Can AI find it?
NASA Space Technology As a machine learningscientist at NASA, Hamed Valizadegan once trained an algorithm to examine images of blood vessels in astronauts’ retinas, improving efforts to understand vision changes in microgravity. It was important work, but Valizadegan, who never lost his childhood love of the night sky, couldn’t shake his desire to study the stars.“I could watch the sky for hours, contemplating the meaning of life and whether we are alone in this vast universe,” he says. Early on, however, his space scientist colleagues seemed reluctant to embrace artificial intelligence as a tool for exploring the cosmos. That may be because advanced algorithms don’t typically show their work. Sophisticated AI systems are inspired by the brain, so individual synthetic “neurons” make computations and then pass information to other nodes in the network. The resulting...
