Using AI to look at the Sun

Roberto Saracco January 19, 2015 Blog 122 Views

The extent to which ICT is being used is amazing, at least to me! I just discovered that scientists are using Artificial Intelligence techniques to predict solar flares.
As you know, solar flares are intense emission of energy from the Sun in form of ionising radiation. They are the consequences of twisted magnetic fields that act as lenses focussing the energy emission from the fusion processes going on inside the Sun. Problem is, we do not understand very well wha causes these twisted magnetic fields and we don’t know how to predict them. We know for sure that they occur over a period of 11 years (and we at the peak of activity just now). 
Solar flares have an impact on us here on the Earth and on astronauts traveling outside the Earth protective magnetic field: strong flares (identified as M or X)  can disrupt communications and can bathe astronauts in dangerous radiations. Hence the importance of predicting them.
Physicists at Stanford have used data collected by the Solar Dynamics Observatory, SDO, a NASA satellite collecting the equivalent of 1.5TB of data each day, to train a computer for predicting the occurrence of flairs.
They have been using Artificial Intelligence techniques to have the computer analyse the data received from the SDO. They fed the computer with about 70% of the available data and used the remaining 30% to see how good it was to predict the flares. It turns out that the computer is pretty good in predicting the flares…
Notice that it is not a matter of statistical number crunching. You need to predict more than just the occurrence of a flare. You want to know where on the surface of the Sun the flare will occur and the characteristics of the magnetic field that acting like a focussing lens will direct the radiations over a very specific cone in the space, and you need to know if the Earth or the astronauts will be in that cone….
Really amazing what ICT can do. Even if I keep saying that ICT is pervasive, well, I am still surprised to see how much pervasive it is!

About Roberto Saracco

Roberto Saracco fell in love with technology and its implications long time ago. His background is in math and computer science. Until April 2017 he led the EIT Digital Italian Node and then was head of the Industrial Doctoral School of EIT Digital up to September 2018. Previously, up to December 2011 he was the Director of the Telecom Italia Future Centre in Venice, looking at the interplay of technology evolution, economics and society. At the turn of the century he led a World Bank-Infodev project to stimulate entrepreneurship in Latin America. He is a senior member of IEEE where he leads the New Initiative Committee and co-chairs the Digital Reality Initiative. He is a member of the IEEE in 2050 Ad Hoc Committee. He teaches a Master course on Technology Forecasting and Market impact at the University of Trento. He has published over 100 papers in journals and magazines and 14 books.

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