I’m in! Google Summer of Code: The SETI Institute

So I got this mail in my inbox from Google:

Dear Aditya,

Congratulations! Your proposal “Open sourcing of Exploratory Techniques for the SETI Search” as submitted to “SETI Institute” has been accepted for Google Summer of Code 2011.

I’m in! 🙂

I’ll be interning with the SETI Institute (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence). My project’s title is Open Sourcing of Exploratory Techniques for the SETI Search. The competition was tough, and so will be the work. I’m looking forward to an exciting summer with tons of code and signal analysis.

My mentor is Gerry Harp, who is an astrophysicist at the SETI Institute. Guided by him and Rob Ackermann, I’ll be implemeting and improving their signal search algorithms as reference implementations in C, and publishing them in the form of an official SETI library. These algorithms, together with the published SETI observation data, should enable citizen scientists and enthusiasts to analyse signals on their own, thus inching closer to Dr. Jill Tarter’s 2009 TED wish:

I wish that you would empower Earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company.

The work will provide people with a way to analyze the data collected by the Allen Telescope Array (ATA).

I’ll regularly be blogging about my work.