Applied Artificial Intelligence for Science & Exploration Enabled by Public-Private Partnerships

AMS Seminar Series

Speaker: Madhulika Guhathakurta, NASA Innovation Initiatives Impact (NI³), NASA Ames Research Center
November 12, 2019

Presentation

Seminar Slide Deck (PDF-198.1MB)

Abstract

NASA Frontier Development Laboratory (FDL) is an applied Artificial Intelligence (AI) research partnership focused on challenges in space science and exploration. The recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities are particularly relevant to NASA science and exploration goals because there is growing evidence that AI techniques can improve our ability to model, understand and predict our environment using the petabytes of data already within NASA archives. The 2019 program, held at the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center focused on AI based science opportunities within the fields of Earth Observation applied to flood prediction and response, Lunar Resources, Astronaut Health, Heliophysics and Space Weather. The program is an 8-week concentrated R&D deep-dive process using the latest developments in machine learning and access to cutting-edge academic research—and enormous compute resources provided by FDL’s commercial AI partners—as well as detailed industry partner case studies, showcasing the potential application of AI to space challenge domains.

NASA FDL is a public private partnership between NASA Ames Research Center and the SETI Institute with international scope, including private sector engagement from partners including Nvidia, Lockheed Martin, HPE, Google Cloud, Intel, IBM, KX, the Canadian Space Agency, and the Luxembourg Space Agency. Four prior FDL sessions have demonstrated that meaningful progress could be industrialized by bringing together individuals at the Ph.D. and Post-Doc level as well as members from industry together to work on connected, but adjacent problems in a shared space mentored by senior scientists with a deep knowledge of the problems. FDL uses sprint methodologies championed by Silicon Valley start-up culture for faster results; places emphasis on interdisciplinary teams for better research quality and viability, and public-private partnerships to lower the costs of high-risk innovation within an expensive technology domain. FDL results will be shared that demonstrate the power of bridging research disciplines and the potential that AI/ML has for supporting research goals, improving on current methodologies, enabling new discoveries, while doing so in accelerated timeframes.

Biography

Madhulika "Lika" Guhathakurta is an Astrophysicist with Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters. Before joining HQ in December of 1998, her career focused on studying the importance of the scientific exploration of space in particular understanding the Sun as a star and its influence on the planet Earth, with a research focus on the Sun’s outermost layer, the solar corona. She has been a co-investigator on five Spartan 201 missions onboard space shuttles to study the solar corona and nine eclipse expeditions. She led the Living with a Star Program for the past 15 years, the goal of which is to understand and ultimately predict solar variability and its diverse effects on Earth, human technology, and astronauts in space, also known as "space weather”. She has led missions such as STEREO, SDO, Van Allen Probes, Solar Orbiter Collaboration, Parker Solar Probe, and others. She initiated space weather as a permanent agenda item at UNCOPUOS in 2013 and started the International Living with a Star (ILWS) in 2003. Partnered with museums to produce planetarium and 3D IMAX shows that are being exhibited internationally. She created graduate level textbooks to train the next generation in heliophysics and led 2017 eclipse science. Presently, she is on detail to NASA Ames Research Center, exploring concepts for new initiatives by fusing science, technology, and public-private partnership.