SETI at UCLA

“Are we alone in the universe?” is a Zooniverse-based citizen science project designed to accelerate the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). The project launched on February 14, 2023 and is accessible at http://arewealone.earth. It features UCLA SETI data obtained with the 100 m Green Bank Telescope (Margot et al., 2023, AJ http://arxiv.org/abs/2308.02712). Volunteers are presented with spectrograms containing narrowband radio signals, and tasked to answer a few questions about each signal’s structure. These answers enable progress through a decision tree and result in the classification of each signal into one of twenty categories. Along the way, volunteers highlight the most promising technosignatures. The final product is a labeled set of spectrograms. This labeled set, while a work in progress, is currently being used to train a machine learning application to excise radio frequency interference (RFI) from future SETI datasets. Preliminary results are promising, with the application identifying the top 4 most common forms of RFI with an F-1 score of over 0.90 (0.99 on the most common form). We will present improvements to the design of the application and updated performance metrics at the meeting. Funded by NASA, The Planetary Society, and generous donors, “Are we alone in the Universe?” has already inspired over 20,000 volunteers who have collectively submitted over 700,000 classifications and generated a labeled training set with over 25,000 entries.