All those American acronyms:)
Anyway. You guessed right. ML stands for Machine Learning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning

What is it going to Learn? AI---whatever that is already written into the computer program that is acting in an intelligent way. I suggest that we stick to more high-powered, cheap GPU's and get busy administering signal processing "intelligence" to include looking for CONTENT. Quantum this, Quantum that, AI, Machine learning, threshold logic, artificial Intelligence, neural networks etc--Folks; its all Boolean logic-2 states zeros and ones. It all decomposes into Boolean logic that can be implemented with standard logic gates and rendered so well now in Large-Scale Integration on Silicon chips.

D-Wave, a Canadian firm, is producing a quantum computer that does not use logic gates but searches for a ground state of a system. Google and NASA are testing it.
Tullio

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Actually ML and AI are new technologies used to find patterns among big data.
I think Nitpicker used humans to find patterns in the SETI data using for instance waterfall diagrams.
Now humans are very good to find patterns, machines are not.
And there is lot of data to examine. A lot more than humans can handle.
Well, I suppose this new approach will take a lot of time to develop but perhaps the only way to go further.

I really don't care much about "credit" for my contributions. I care about the number of work units I return and overall status of a project's goal. Currently SAH does not show me, in summary, how many results I have returned and/or return each day...just RAC.

As someone mentioned, I also have been pouring all of my computing resources into non-SAH BOINC projects (I do the World Community Grid Cancer ones)....basically the past 10 years. I had felt that after 10 years of my contributions to SAH with 0 results (which is ok) and little enthusiasm from SAH (not the forum members) that in general I/we were being neglected. Coincidentally, the Cancer projects appeared in BOINC and I felt it was far more valuable to try to cure a disease. Ironically, WCG has become pretty unenthusiastic the past 5 years. There is an iOS app called DreamLab which is about 1.5 years old...fantastic GUI appeal and News, but the app has many flaws (won't auto start/restart, requires a/c to run, any hiccup in WIFI shuts the app down, etc.) I hope they fix these issues so people can set it and forget it just like BOINC.

Now that I have stumbled upon SAH utilizing GPU while WCG Cancer projects do not utilize GPU, I'm offering all my GPU resources back to SAH.

I'd love to see SAH gain in popularity as well as gain attention and money from donors (there seems to be a lot more SETI talk the past year but maybe it's the Google advertising :) ). But if SAH isn't gaining attention/donations, there's obviously a reason(s) for it. Maybe it's lack of advertising...maybe lack of user base...maybe past wasteful spending...maybe poor leadership. But there is a reason.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that SAH is reborn. :)

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SETi@home has 4 scientists, two of them at half-time. The SETI Institute has 140 people. It is clear that they can do a lot more PR and advertising.
Tullio

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I wouldn't say neglected. But people say look, Seti has been going for XX years, I have crunched for YY years, and there have been no results. All they do is store our returned work away in a database and back it up each week. Nothing gets done with it. Do I want to spend another YY years of my time and money in the same way and likely be no further forward. The answer is likely no, that effort can more better mankind in other BOINC projects.

Correct...I think a LOT of people feel this way. *BUT* if SAH were to better and far more frequent News bulletins/emails in laymen's terms (results, milestones, accomplishments, donations needed, etc.) then I think a good percentage of people would stick around.

I've been crunching for Cancer for 10+ years and we have not found a cure yet. However, the News at WCG (even though it isn't that often) far surpasses SAH over the past 15 years.

If a project that I am volunteering at is not going to keep me in the loop (often) about how the project is doing or help that is needed, I'm going to leave the project because either they don't care enough to keep me informed or they have nothing useful to say. In the world of volunteering, no news is NOT good news.

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In the world of volunteering, no news is NOT good news.

Totally agree .
We all know that there are no signals found that could be artifical from outer space.
But surely there have been some candidates that could have been.
Why doesn't Seti@Home at very least share that news to the community and perhaps explain to us why the candidates was not considered artifical?

There was a frequent news post by Matt Lebofsky, who was also a musician and a rapper. But it seems he has passed to BreakthroughListen for a better reward and we don't hear him anymore.
Tullio

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The only way forward that I see this project surviving is to get Nebula up and running. If DA can't or won't do it, then someone else will have to. Also we used to have regular hardware funding drives from the GPU Users Group, that seems to have all gone as well. People wouldn't donate $100 to a general fund, but would to buy a disk drive with their notional name on it.

I still have my 15 year Seti Anni sweat shirt, I was the UK distributor of those and sent 10 or so out at my own cost from a batch delivered from the USA. What's happening about the 20 year Anni in April this year? Sweet F A !!! A golden opportunity missed for some global PR. But, as some pointed out, if we increased our user base by 50% could our infrastructure cope with it?

I don't know the names of the people who run SAH or even if they check these boards daily. How about someone craft an open letter/email/blog/whatever to them with ideas to revive SAH? I would, but I don't know the problems and proposals as well as failed attempts in the past.

I would DEFINITELY donate money towards particular pieces of SAH such as hardware or a fundraiser to go out and buy some dish or whatever. If SAH is a non-profit, then my/our companies would match me.

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Eric does monitor the Number Crunching part of the boards - he rarely posts in them as he doesn't want to "disturb the flow".
The same can be said for David Anderson, but his posts are even rarer.
I'm fairly certain Jeff monitors them as well, but I can't recall him posting here.
And that's it for the management and majority of the staff, all of whom are part time.
There was Matt who was a good communicator, but his funding for SETI@Home dried up and he got a job on the Breakthrough Listening Project.
There have been a few interns and post-grad students over the years.

David Anderson & Eric do a lot of work on the successor to Nitpicker - Nebula - which is very much in the development phase and no real results have come out from it yet, but is showing promise as a way of analysing the mountain of data.

A few things to think about...
One of the main precepts of S@H is that an "intelligent civilization" will be reading a signal fairly continuously over a number of years, rather than a "once-off" WOW type signal. This means the same part of the sky has to be revisited a number of time over time, thus there had to be a number of years of data collection before any realistic chance of confirming detection.
Until recently the data collection was "random", in the sense that S@H couldn't choose the where in the sky data would be collected from. The BLP has produced "targeted" data, but I'm not sure if they've done much revisits yet.
We are only observing one narrow band of the whole RF spectrum, one that is not used by humans as a primary communications source, but is a very common side-band for communications.
S@H has no intent to decode any signal, just to detect a signal for others to monitor continuously to possibly enable decoding.
S@H has always been strapped for cash, both for capital revenue expenditure.

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

From my screensavers I see that Arecibo data are taken at 1.42 GHz while Green Bank data are taken at 4.799 GHZ.
Tullio

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