The Watering Hole in the Universe

Peter Ma was bored in his high school computer science class. So he decided to teach himself something new: how to use artificial intelligence to find alien life. That’s how he eventually became the lead author of a groundbreaking study published in Nature Astronomy. The study reveals how Ma and his co-authors used AI to analyze a massive dataset of radio signals collected by the SETI Breakthrough Listen project. They found eight signals that might just be technosignatures, or signs of alien technology. In this episode of the NVIDIA AI Podcast, host Noah Kravitz interviews Ma, who is now an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto. Ma tells Kravitz how he stumbled upon this problem and how he developed an AI algorithm that outperformed traditional methods in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. You can read more about Ma’s research on NVIDIA’s blog: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2023/02/06/ai-potential-alien-signals/