Facebook facial recognition AI now 'burping' supermassive black holes

AI has been used to identify radio galaxies in the farthest parts of the known universe.

When it comes to discussing what the future of astronomy would be, it would be impossible to ignore the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in locating and cataloging trillions of galaxies significantly faster than humans ever could.

One such new AI – called ClaRAN – has been revealed by the University of Western Australia The International Center for Radio Astronomy is looking for the most powerful radio stations in the world of radio galaxies .

ClaRAN grew out of an open source version of Microsoft and Facebook's object detection software and the latter's case, faces. Now, in a paper published to Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the researchers detailed how it is completely overhauled to recognize galaxies instead of people.

The open source AI will be paired with the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder telescope where it is expected to observe up to 70m galaxies.

14 radio galaxy predictions ClaRAN made during its scan of radio and infrared data. All predictions were made with a high level of confidence, shown as above. Image: Dr. Chen Wu and Dr. Ivy Wong, ICRAR / UWA

'This is the future of programming'

While traditional algorithms can correctly identify galaxy sources, there are still 10pc – equivalent to 7m galaxies – which can be considered 'difficult' and require a human to look over them.

"If we reduce the number of sources of visualization down to 1pc," said Dr. Ivy Wong of the team.

Her colleague, Dr. Chen Wu, added: "All you do is set up a huge neural network, give [ClaRAN] to your data, and let it figure out how to adjust its internal connections in order to generate the expected outcome.

"The new generation of programmers spend their time on AI algorithms to optimize the rest. This is the future of programming. "