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SPEAKER 1: We're here in the Customer Magic neighborhood
with a pretty impressive booth here, with NASA and James,
the director of NASA FDL
JAMES PARR: Yeah, I am.
NASA FDL is an applied AI research lab for NASA.
It's a public-private partnership, which is great.
So it means we can ask corporate partners, experts in AI,
to help us with our problems.
SPEAKER 1: So with that in mind, how does Google Cloud
and NASA FDL work together?
JAMES PARR: Well, we had a big problem.
And the problem was, are we alone,
which is kind of the big one.
And we knew that you liked big problems.
So we thought, well, hey, we'll call up Google
and see if they can help us.
What's interesting about this problem is
we have scientists who are fantastic at understanding
the problem, and enormous data, like data
you can imagine how big it is.
SPEAKER 1: Just--
JAMES PARR: --huge.
And so really we needed a corporate expert like Google
to help us.
And what we prototyped with Google Cloud with FDL
is the sort of relationships and sort
of partnerships which NASA's going
to need if we're going to be putting people
on the moon in five years.
So it's really, if you like, a toe in the water about how
the future should be, just in terms
of the way we're solving problems,
the way we're partnering.
That's what we've been prototyping with you guys.
And that's really what Google is amazing at.
And I have to say, thank you for the help you guys have given.
Because we did.
We've done some really extraordinary work here.
And I think [INAUDIBLE] is going to take us
through some of the fragments of what was done.
And this is what you can come and see at this booth.
We're very proud of the work.
And I'd just like to say thanks again.
SPEAKER 1: Of course.
I mean, it's great to hear.
It's super exciting to see this kind of really turn to,
what can we actually do with this technology?
How do we help people?
And so we're going to walk through and see
what people here Next can kind of get their hands on
and experiment with, and then also see, how does that
help us answer, are we alone?
JAMES PARR: Yeah, the team have done
a great job of taking something really complex
and making it really simple.
And you can have a go, and play with your light curves,
and finding the exoplanets.
So there's some really cool stuff
to get your hands on here as well.
SPEAKER 1: Awesome.
Let's take a look.
JAMES PARR: Yeah, go for it.
SPEAKER 1: So we just talked to James
about how the partnership between NASA FDL and Google
Cloud helped enable scientists to really start
doing this analysis.
What can people here at Next actually play
with to see what that looks like?
MASSIMO MASCARO: Yeah, absolutely.
So the challenge was grandiose, right,
finding life on other planets.
So how do you break it down in steps?
So step one, you have to find other planets that
are outside the solar system.
So we actually worked on that challenge to start with.
And what you can see here is a little bit of a representation
of how that works.
SPEAKER 1: Sure.
Let's take a look.
MASSIMO MASCARO: So here you have one of these light curves.
And the task here you can do is actually
to kind of classify it by eye, is this a planet or not.
So as you can see, actually, it's a quite hard task.
You have to kind of understand when things are planet or not.
And there are actually a lot of subtleties here.
This takes actually a lot of human labor
and a lot of astrophysics minds actually
spent on this, for years.
So what we had as an idea is that,
can we actually have machine learning help us with this.
And so we use, actually, the power of deep learning
and AI in Google Cloud to kind of train
a model that does this.
So the researchers did this actually with our technology.
And actually they were able to get a model that is not only
more accurate than humans, it can actually kind of process
entire data sets in minutes, where before actually it
took years.
SPEAKER 1: So people can kind of see
the details of why it was so important to have machine
learning to help out the human knowledge that was required
to make this happen.
MASSIMO MASCARO: Absolutely.
SPEAKER 1: So for those exoplanets,
can we take a look at those in the mobile apps over there?
MASSIMO MASCARO: Yeah.
So like here we have a very simple app
that you can use to kind of scan the sky.
And there are a lot of planets in the sky.
And once you point at one of those planets,
you can actually kind of study it,
and you would get the composition of the atmosphere
of that planet.
So this actually is more kind of a gamified version
of this that represents why is this so important.
SPEAKER 1: So this is like a cool way
to see and kind of get a little bit of a taste
into exactly what goes into making those decisions
and understanding all the technology that's required
to say, look, we're now making these predictions,
let's see if we can find somewhere and actually answer,
is there life out there?
MASSIMO MASCARO: Absolutely.
And again, I mean, the beauty of this is that a lot of this work
has been done by astrophysicists and kind
of astronomy researchers that didn't
have a lot of IT knowledge or AI knowledge.
They were just powered by both the power of computation
and Google Cloud, and by our AI tools,
kind of answered these really, really hard questions.
SPEAKER 1: Right.
It lets them focus on what's important to them,
and the technology just helps enable it.
MASSIMO MASCARO: Absolutely.
SPEAKER 1: That's awesome.
Thanks so much.
MASSIMO MASCARO: Thank you.
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