by Angela Guess

According to a new press release, “NASA Frontier Development Lab (FDL) announced its 2017 challenges and opened the participant application process, with a deadline of April 19, 2017. Hosted in Silicon Valley by the SETI Institute, FDL is a graduate-level summer workshop developed in partnership with NASA Ames Research Center. The eight-week program tackles knowledge gaps in space science by pairing machine learning expertise with astronomy and planetary science expertise at the PhD level. Interdisciplinary teams address tightly defined problems and the format encourages rapid iteration and prototyping to create outputs with meaningful application to the space program.”

The release continues, “The workshop features partnership with technology leaders in machine learning from the private sector and academia. Partners bring advanced hardware, software and cloud-based resources, and provide coaching to research participants. FDL Partners for 2017 include IBM, The University of Southern California Machine Learning Center, Autodesk, NVIDIA and Miso Technologies. Entering its second year, FDL strives to create research outcomes that support NASA goals, while simultaneously showcasing cutting-edge partner capabilities in deep learning and artificial intelligence.”

It adds, “The 2017 program expands the size and scope of the 2016 workshop, increasing the number of participants and expanding the research categories to three key topics: Planetary Defense (being smarter than the dinosaurs), Space Weather (predicting the trillion-dollar storm), and Space Resources (living off the land as we build a new frontier).”

Read more at Business Wire.

Photo credit: NASA