How much spare brain power do you have?

The search for extraterrestrial life has evolved. Many have heard of volunteer computing,  a term that has become more familiar with the likes of SETI@home,  but now a new kid has hit the block: http://setiquest.org. Launched last year, Setiquest is targeted at programmers, developers and citizen scientists who have spare time for open-source code development. Volunteer thinking is the premise and the initiative invites programming-literate individuals to improve the search for extraterrestrial signals.

This is opposed to the popular volunteer computing project, SETI@home, a scientific experiment using web-connected computers to help the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).  SETI@home’s software functions during a computer’s idle computing time, by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data. This effectively makes all the PCs on the network act as one large high-performance computer. In contrast, SETI@home uses the Arecibo telescope,  while Setiquest uses data from the Allen Telescope Array.

Avinash Agrawal, one of the project’s directors said, “Just as scientists looks for signs of life to determine the presence of life, we look for signs of technology to determine evidence of intelligence.”

The SETI system searches for radio signals in the microwave band and rejects certain signals – such as background noise - that it recognizes mathematically. However, over 100,000 data packets are still received every minute. Setiquest appoints this sorting-out task directly to human beings who relish the challenge to optimize real ‘E.T.’ data, instead of leaving the work to the software and hardware.

Setiquest’s research is currently focused on signals in the strong and narrow band of 0.5 GHz to 11 GHz. This is equivalent to finding a radio station above the static noise on an FM radio. This analogue data is converted into digital information by digital signal processing, which is then processed by computers. Users can download this data from an Amazon Web Services cloud,  but if they do not want to process the data on their local computer, they can use a service provided by Cloudant.  This enables data processing on a network of remote computers within the cloud, turning the cloud infrastructure into a sort of grid. (Computers work in parallel instead of sequentially).

This new ‘crowdsourcing’ experiment is hoping to find intelligent sparks on Earth to program innovative signal processing algorithms, or write better software widgets to search and filter through the volumes of signals that SETI receive daily. Time will tell if those with spare programming time answer Setiquest’s beck and call. Setiquest will provide access to their open-source software early in the year.

-Adrian Giordani, iSGTW