NASA and Google have some exciting news!
NASA plans to announce their latest finding from its planet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope in a press conference scheduled for Thursday. Although the Kepler has found other planets outside our solar system, this announcement shares the spotlight with the online search giant because the discovery was made by researchers using machine learning from Google.
“Machine learning is an approach to artificial intelligence, and demonstrates new ways of analyzing Kepler data,” said NASA in their statement.
The Bay Area participants highlighted in the news conference include Christopher Shallue, a senior software engineer at Google Al and Jessie Dotson, a Kepler project scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center. Other participants included in the news briefing include Paul Hertz, the Astrophysics Division director at NASA headquarters and Andrew Vanderburg, an astronomer and NASA Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas, Austin.
What the discovery is won’t be revealed until Thursday’s press conference but it could be related to a new planet discovery since Shallue and Vanderburg have been collaborating to use machine learning to find new planet candidates in Kepler data.
You can watch a live stream of the news conference at their website on Thursday, Dec. 14 at 1 p.m.
