One of the great scientific projects of our time is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence or SETI — the hunt for evidence of technologically advanced civilizations elsewhere in the galaxy. The current manifestation of this endeavor is the Breakthrough Listen Initiative, which uses radio telescopes to look for signals that cannot have a terrestrial origin.
The big challenge in this effort is combing through massive data sets — hundreds of hours of data at multiple frequencies. Researchers have found tens of millions of false positives in these datasets and so would dearly love a quicker way to filter out the weeds.
