Brit boffins teach mere PCs to find galaxies in Hubble pics

As astronomical datasets head towards the petabyte scale, they'll be too big for even crowd-sourced labelling and analysis, so a pair of Brit boffins are working on teaching computers to see and label galaxies in Hubble images. In doing so, they believe the algorithm they've created (a combination of “growing neural gas” or …

[Chairo]

Boinc project anyone?

Please let this become a Boinc project! It would fit exactly the scope of Boinc. Send out work packages with Hubble images and let everyone participate in analysing them for NASA.

What's not to like?

[Terry 6]

Must be getting closer to weekend

I read the heading, and thought it was getting off-duty coppers to look at the images. (Trained observers after all).

Which would be much more interesting. IMHO, of course.

Roll on Friday.

[Alan J. Wylie]

Hanny's Voorwerp

What would it make of Hanny's Voorwerp? I would hope it would flag such anomalies up for human investigation.

[Grikath]

Re: Hanny's Voorwerp

well I'd say they will put in a "Hey, that's funny... " flag somewhere. The whole idea of these things is basically to identify ( and categorise) the Normal Stuff automatically and hopefully accurately.

After all, the real trick is not picking out what you expect to be there, but the things that "shouldn't" be..

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Hanny's Voorwerp

After you pick out what "should be", whatever's left is by definition a "shouldn't be".

[Neoc]

Re: Hanny's Voorwerp

One of the fundamental tenets in parsing log files is that you do not "look for what isn't supposed to be there", you "remove what's expected and see what's left".

I expect they're doing the same here.