SETI Brainstorm

For over a decade, the SETI@home experiment has engaged millions of people in the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence by harnessing the spare CPU cycles of project participants to process data collected at the Arecibo radio telescope. The immensely powerful supercomputer formed by SETI@home is enabling the most sensitive and thorough sky survey for extraterrestrial technological radio emission ever performed. Today we are launching a new public participation SETI project to complement SETI@home – SETI Brainstorm. In addition to offering the opportunity to passively process SETI data, we are now making some of the raw data from our observations available to the world and asking YOU to take a look with your own eyes, ears and algorithms. Our experiments generate massive amounts of data, often many gigabits per second, so for now we will only distribute observations of a single target. If response to this project is strong, we will find ways to make even more of our observations accessible.

The initially released data are observations of the binary star system 55 Cancri collected during the commissioning phase of our Kepler Field SETI experiment at the Green Bank Telescope (GBT). 55 Cancri A (the larger of the two stars in the binary system) is known to host at least five extrasolar planets, and there may be more. The 55 Cancri system is about 40 ly away from our own Solar System in the constellation Cancer. 55 Cancri was the target of a directed interstellar communication signal in 2003, scheduled to arrive in 2044.

These data are now available for BitTorrent download using the links at SETI Brainstorm. If you have questions, please post here first. SETI@home and Kepler SETI scientists will be checking in regularly to help. Good luck, and good hunting!

It occurred to me that we are processing raw data in SETI-AT-Home. Couldn't there be a quick post-antenna process to throw out the bulk of this data that does not correlate above the noise.

We then might have more time to investigate, checkout and "Clutter Map" other signals that are more interesting.

Hi tullio,

Our hope is that interested participants will search these data using their own ideas and algorithms, create software tools for visualizations and perhaps audio realizations of the data and share their results back with the community. Signal detection in time series data is a challenge in many branches of science and engineering, and we know that there are techniques in use in other fields that could be useful for SETI. Moreover, we are frequently asked by both astronomers and the public if raw data is available, and in the past it has been difficult to provide because we didn't have easy to use code to extract and explain our data. This project is also designed to simply make our data more accessible to a wider group of people.

Cheers,

Andrew

Thanks Andrew,
Will be mulling over a few ideas for this.

Jason
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"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change."
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Andrew,
Interesting idea. But i can't see this taking off. People, volunteers, might be useful at seeing something unusual in a visual image displaying a signal on a graph. But offering dot py files to the public and asking them to spot sequences in the numbers will get you nowhere.

To be honest, it sounds like you would be better off writing to the editor of one of the astronomy journals or science magazines and asking them to publish a short article asking for participation from the science community to help process the data using new methods.

This will flop if your asking the public to manually scan pages of numbers and unprocessed data. Take example from the success they have had with Galaxy Zoo. Galaxy Zoo is successful because its an interesting human task to look a pictures.

Good luck with your new project.
John.
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Hi John,

Thanks for your thoughts. Our intent is not for the general public to rotely scan pages of numbers. Hopefully the smaller fraction of people with some experience in signal processing and electrical engineering will be able to put together tools to translate the data into a form where the less technically inclined majority can participate. We are working on ways to do this within our group, but we would love to have your help. Galaxy Zoo is a fantastic project, but we are still experimenting with depictions of our data that would be effective at engaging the public's minds as well as their machines. Again, one of the goals of this project is to 'brainstorm' ways of looking at and thinking about our data. If you have some specific ideas, please share them!

Cheers,

Andrew

I think that this initiative is worthwhile. Seti has limited funds and a finite number of people to work on the ever increasing amount of data that we continue to feed into them. By providing some of this raw data to others, this allows hundreds more, maybe thousands of other scientists and gifted people to have a look at it and analyse it, in maybe different ways than Seti does.

It is just extending the basic principle of distributed computing a little further. DC computing collects the data, now DC computing is distributing the most promising parts of it back, for further analysis.

Good Luck !
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It occurred to me that we are processing raw data in SETI-AT-Home. Couldn't there be a quick post-antenna process to throw out the bulk of this data that does not correlate above the noise.

We then might have more time to investigate, checkout and "Clutter Map" other signals that are more interesting.

Isn't that already being done by Berkeley with a big lump of hardware working in real-time across a much broader band of frequencies?

The s@h search is doing a more limited search but for far greater sensitivity to look for weaker signals that will be missed by the broader/faster real-time hardware search.

This is a fantastic initiative and exactly the type of openness in science we need. There are literally millions of IT professionals globally. Many participate (like actually write software) in a wide variety of open source projects - think Linux, Firefox, OpenOffice, BOINC - we are talking millions of lines of code donated by qualified developers. Almost all of whom grew up on star trek, run Seti@home, and keep up with news on Kepler. Some, such as myself, even have a statistical programming background, and run multi-million dollar IT projects. You have plenty of potential talent.

What you need is better marketing. The only reason I heard about this effort is because I randomly happened upon the forums. You need to get the word out to the right crowd. You also need to find a few key people who can form a "backbone" group that can answer questions about development environments, useful libraries, kick around algo ideas, database structures, etc...

The only downside is that you're going to initially get a huge amount of skepticism around a project like this. Most scientists or software developers don't think the "public" can seriously contribute to science and typically exist in a culture where your data, your technology, and your methods must be strictly guarded (maybe the reason you were only able to release one small piece of data). What if someone publishes before us?!
These folks won't understand crowd sourcing project.

I strongly encourage you to keep this idea alive despite the nay-sayers.

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....I said small amount of data, and as I torrent it I see there's about 100GB of data here. What's the time duration of this data sample?
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Several years ago I happened to crunch workunits with Seti@home v3.08 and returned 486 classic workunits back to the server.

If a typical Seti@home user was allowed access to the material which obviously has been collected over the years, should this user still be able to draw his or her personal conclusions from the material that is readily available to him or her?

What if something should be visible in this material?

Hi Mariod,

This is a fantastic idea. We'll post some pulsar data later this week.

- Andrew

....I said small amount of data, and as I torrent it I see there's about 100GB of data here. What's the time duration of this data sample?

Very interesting, thanks.
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