Contact — BLUK

Schedule

9:00 Coaches to SKAO leaving from The Alderley Edge and The Stanneylands Hotels
9:30 Check-in and light breakfast
10:00 Welcome - Andrew Siemion - UC Berkeley
10:15 Introduction to Breakthrough Listen observing program - Vishal Gajjar - SETI Institute
10:45 Breakthrough Listen's student engagement - Steve Croft - UC Berkeley
11:00 Exploring BL’s Data Products and Public Archives - Matt Lebofsky - UC Berkeley
11:45 Microsecond-duration bursts from FRB 20121102A - Mark Snelders - ASTRON / University of Amsterdam
12:15 Extraterrestrial Axion Search with the Breakthrough Listen Galactic Center Survey - Joshua Foster - University of Michigan
12:45 Lunch
14:00 Interactive Tutorial: Utilizing turboSETI and SPANDAK for Signal Analysis - Karen Perez and Carmen Choza - Columbia University & SETI Institute
15:00 Searching for technosignatures with radio telescope arrays - Daniel Czech - UC Berkeley
15:30 Target selection demo: The SETI Ellipsoid strategy for technosignature searches - Bárbara Cabrales - Berkeley SETI Research Center
16:00 Coffee Break
16:15 Live Observational Session with the Allen Telescope Array: Opportunities and Insights - Wael Farah and Joe Bright - SETI Inst. & Uni. of Oxford
17:15 Concluding Thoughts, Open Forum, and Interactive Discussion - Vishal Gajjar
17:30 Coaches to The Stanneylands Hotel
18:00 Mixer at The Stanneylands
20:30 Coach to the Alderley Edge Hotel
9:00 Coaches to SKAO leaving from The Alderley Edge and The Stanneylands Hotels
9:30 Check-in and light breakfast
10:00 Welcome:
Catherine Cesarsky - Chair, Council of the Square Kilometre Array Observatory - via Zoom
Philip Diamond - SKAO Director-General
Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell - University of Oxford
10:30 Session One: Introductory Talks - Vishal Gajjar - SETI Institute
11:00 Session Two: Nearby Exoplanets - Chair: Suzanne Aigrain - University of Oxford
Radio stars and exoplanets - Joe Callingham - ASTRON / Leiden University **
Spectroscopic Searches for Biosignatures and Technosignatures in Exoplanets - Nikku Madhusudhan - University of Cambridge **
The search for Earth-like exoplanets with PLATO - Paul Strøm - University of Warwick **
Planetary science across light-years - Giovanna Tinetti - University College London **
Calculating the Rise of Continents - Jane Greaves - Cardiff University *
Q&A & Discussion
12:30 Lunch & Group Picture
14:00 Session 3: State-of-the-art technosignature science - Chair: Mike Garrett - University of Manchester
SETI at TCD - Evan Keane - Trinity College Dublin **
Narrowband Signal Searches Towards the Galactic Plane and Center - Karen Perez - Columbia University **
An automated commensal technosignature survey at MeerKAT - Daniel Czech - UC Berkeley **
Technosignature Searches at Low Frequencies (10 - 190 MHz) - Owen Johnson - Trinity College Dublin **
Preparing Humanity for the Discovery of Extra-terrestrial Life (The SETI Post Detection Hub) - John Elliott - University of St. Andrews **
Q&A & Discussion
15:30 Coffee Break
16:00 Session 4: Anomaly Detection / Machine Learning - Chair: Chris Lintott
AI for Astrophysics: Challenges and Opportunities - Anna Scaife - University of Manchester **
Anomaly detection in LSST Solar System data - Brian Rogers - Queen's University Belfast **
Anomaly Detection and Citizen Science for Transient Discovery with MeerKAT - Alexander Andersson - University of Oxford *
Anomaly Detection and Machine Learning- Stephen Smartt - University of Oxford **
Bayesian Anomaly Detection - Sam Leeney - University of Cambridge *
Q&A & Discussion
17:45 Walk to First Light Pavilion (10 min walk)
18:00 Reception at First Light Pavilion - Includes Dome Show and Exhibition
22:00 Coaches back to Hotels (leaving from First Light Pavilion car park)

Invited talk ** Contributed talk *
9:00 Coaches to SKAO leaving from The Alderley Edge and The Stanneylands Hotels
9:30 Check-in and light breakfast
10:00 Invocation : Steve Croft - UC Berkeley
10:15 Session 5: Technosignature Technology and Techniques - Chair: Cherry Ng
Millimeter wavelength SETI with the Event Horizon Telescope - Geoff Bower - ASIAA **
Searching for Intergalactic Radio Signals with the GBT - Carmen Choza - SETI Institute **
SETI@Manchester - Mike Garrett - University of Manchester **
Image plane science with the Allen Telescope Array - Joe Bright - University of Oxford **
An Interferometric SETI Observation of Kepler-111 b - Kelvin Wandia - University of Manchester **
Q&A & Discussion
11:30 Coffee Break
11.45 Session 6: Lunar, Space, Technology - Chair: Dave DeBoer
LuSEE 'Night - Stuart Bale - UC Berkeley - via Zoom **
SETI from the Moon - Kris Zarb Adami - University of Oxford **
SETI opportunities with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope - Eamonn Kerins - University of Manchester **
Telescopes on the Moon: the next decades - Joe Silk - Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris (IAP) - via Zoom **
Opportunities for Solar System Technosignature Searches with the LSST - Meg Schwamb - Queen's University Belfast *
Q&A and Discussion
13.00 Lunch
14.30 Session 7: Future outlook, Collaboration, Strategy
Chairs: Andrew Siemion / Jamie Drew / Cherry Ng/ Mike Garrett/ Vishal Gajjar
SKA Update by Phil Diamond
Presentation and Panel Discussion
15:30 Observatory Tour (sign-up at reception) & Astrophotography Exhibition in the Space Pavilion (behind SKAO building)
16:00 First coach to hotels (will stop at both hotels)
17:00 Second coach to hotels (will stop at both hotels). See Taxi cab Sign-Up Sheet at Reception for sharing rides.
Invited talk ** Contributed talk *
Mike Garrett
SETI@Manchester
We are building up a significant SETI research group at Manchester. I will present some recent results and talk about future directions. These include the further development of interferometry SETI with the EVN and the UK national radio astronomy facility - e-MERLIN. In addition, we will be making the most comprehensive search yet for Kardashev Type III civilisations, extending SETI into the sub-mm domain via ALMA and simulating leakage emission from our planet across the e-m spectrum. I will also discuss the success of our multi-disciplinary course – “Are We Alone” that this years attracted 170 undergraduate students from across the University.

Jane Greaves
Calculating the Rise of Continents
I present a preliminary calculation of the earliest times at which continents might have risen for nearby planets. The calculation (published open-access in RNAAS, at https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2515-5172/acf91a) brings together abundances of elements in the host stars and the new GAIA estimates of stellar ages. The first exo-continents could have arisen ~5 Gyr prior to those on Earth, so large biospheres could have well pre-dated our own.

Joe Bright
Image plane science with the Allen Telescope Array
The newly refurbished Allen Telescope Array (ATA) is a powerful tool for technosignature searching, as well as for the study of transient astrophysical phenomena producing both coherent and incoherent radio emission between 1 and 10 GHz. Over the past year great progress has been made in understanding the imaging capabilities of the ATA, with robust system testing demonstrating excellent performance across the entire observing band. I will present the current image plane observing capabilities of the ATA, as well as exciting early science results from observing transient and variables sources, and motivate the place for agile radio arrays in the era of the Square Kilometre Array.

Owen Johnson
Technosignature Searches at Low Frequencies (10 - 190 MHz)
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence aims to find evidence of technosignatures, which can point toward the possible existence of technologically advanced extraterrestrial life. Radio signals similar to those engineered on Earth may be transmitted by other civilizations, motivating technosignature searches across the entire radio spectrum. In this endeavor, the low-frequency radio band has remained largely unexplored; with prior radio searches primarily above 1 GHz. In this presentation we discuss the results of recent low frequency survey of over 1,600,000 stars in our Galaxy with LOFAR (110 - 190 MHz), the expansion of SETI searches to NenuFAR (10 - 85 MHz) and the future observation plans for technosignatures at low frequencies.

Anna Scaife
AI for Astrophysics: Challenges and Opportunities
The expected volume of data from the new generation of scientific facilities such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope has motivated the expanded use of semi-automatic and automatic machine learning algorithms for scientific discovery in astronomy. In this field, the robust and systematic use of machine learning faces a number of specific challenges including a paucity of labelled data for training (paradoxically, although we have too much data, we don't have enough), a clear understanding of the effect of biases introduced due to observational and intrinsic astrophysical selection effects in the training data, and motivating a quantitative statistical representation of outcomes from decisive AI applications. In this I will give an overview of the intersection of AI and astronomy, highlighting some of the challenges and opportunities, as well as giving a perspective on the potential for astronomical foundation models that can be trained on large volumes of unlabelled data to create compressed representations that can be fine-tuned for a variety of downstream task in astrophysics and astronomy.

Nikku Madhusudhan
Spectroscopic Searches for Biosignatures and Technosignatures in Exoplanets
Exoplanet surveys over the past decade have revealed that low-mass planets dominate the exoplanet population. Increasing numbers of such planets are being discovered orbiting nearby small stars (M-dwarfs) making them conducive for atmospheric characterisation with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and large ground-based facilities. The diversity of exoplanet detections are also redefining conventional notions of planetary habitability. Traditionally, studies of planetary habitability have focused predominantly on rocky exoplanets. Recently, a new class of exoplanets, called Hycean worlds, has been proposed which promises to significantly expand and accelerate the search for life elsewhere. In this talk, we will discuss the diversity of exoplanets that could be promising environments for hosting life and good targets in the search for biosignatures and technosignatures in the solar neighbourhood. We will discuss the prospects for detecting such signatures in their atmospheres using current and upcoming large facilities in space and on ground, and the future landscape of the field.

Geoffrey Bower
Millimeter wavelength SETI with the Event Horizon Telescope
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is a global submillimeter-wavelength very long baseline array that produces the highest angular resolution images of black holes. The EHT Collaboration has produced images of two black holes, the supermassive black hole in the elliptical galaxy M87 and the Galactic Center black hole, Sgr A*. EHT data has also been used for the most sensitive search for a Galactic Center pulsar at millimeter wavelengths. In this talk, I will discuss the prospects for SETI research with EHT data.

Mark Snelders
Microsecond-duration bursts from FRB 20121102A
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are extragalactic transient flashes of radio waves with typical durations of milliseconds. FRBs have been shown, however, to present on a wide range of timescales: some show sub-microsecond sub-bursts while others last up to a few seconds. In this talk I will present the discovery of isolated microsecond duration FRBs in archival data from Breakthrough Listen. This shows that there exists a population of ultra-fast radio bursts that current wide-field FRB searches are missing due to insufficient time resolution.

Sam Leeney
Bayesian Anomaly Detection
We propose a novel Bayesian anomaly detection methodology. By evaluating each datapoint compared to the belief that each data point fits some known model, we compute the probability that a data point is anomalous at the likelihood level. This modeling is done in a Bayesian fashion through a piecewise likelihood that is constrained by a Bernoulli prior distribution. The techniques described here can be implemented in just a few lines of code.

Carmen Choza
Searching for Intergalactic Radio Signals with the GBT
The Breakthrough Listen search for technosignatures from extraterrestrial intelligence represents the most comprehensive search to date of nearby celestial objects. In this work, we conducted a radio technosignature search of 97 nearby galactic centers using the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope as part of the Breakthrough Listen initiative. Despite the immense distances to even the closest galaxies, scanning galactic centers allows us to maximize the number of stellar systems surveyed and probe the bright end of the technological luminosity function. We performed a narrowband Doppler drift search across 1-11 GHz frequency bands, establishing minimum signal-to-noise thresholds, drift rates, cadence patterns, and statistical methods to reject radio frequency interference and false positives. Though no clear evidence of extraterrestrial transmitters was found, we placed constraints on the equivalent isotropic radiated power of potential Kardashev Type II civilizations in these galaxies. The analysis framework and lessons learned will be applied to conducting a similar narrowband Doppler drift search of the Breakthrough Listen sample of nearby stars and improving current search pipelines.

Karen Perez
Narrowband Signal Searches Towards the Galactic Plane and Center
Two of the primary targets of the Breakthrough Listen program are the Galactic Center (GC) and a comprehensive blind survey of the entire Galactic Plane (GP) to search for artificial narrowband signals from ETIs. The line of sight toward the GC offers the largest integrated galactic star count of any direction in the sky, is a widely cited possible location for a beacon built by an advanced intelligence, and is the most energetic region in the Milky Way. Likewise, the GP is an ideal direction to search for such signals due to the increased likelihood that transmitters would emit toward this region as opposed to random directions. Here, I will discuss our observing and narrowband search strategy, as well as results from the Parkes Telescope, Green Bank Telescope, and Sardinia Radio Telescope for our GC Survey (0.7 – 93 GHz) so far. I will also discuss an extension of these strategies for our GP Parkes 21cm Multibeam Receiver Survey, covering two full scans of the GP. We employ a multibeam coincidence rejection technique used for Fast Radio Burst detection, which allows us to distinguish terrestrial interferences from truly sky-localized signals. In addition to our traditional narrowband search filters, we incorporate a machine learning filter in the form of a convolutional neural network to differentiate signals from false positives across the 13 beams, resulting in a significant reduction of detected candidates.

Joe Silk
Telescopes on the Moon: the next decades
The lunar surface allows a unique way forward, to go well beyond current limits in astronomy and cosmology. The far side provides a unique radio-quiet environment for probing the dark ages via 21 cm interferometry to seek elusive clues on the building blocks of the galaxies and the nature of inflation. Optical interferometers will eventually provide up to a few microarsecond imaging of the nearest exoplanets. Far-infrared telescopes in cold and dark polar craters will probe the cosmic microwave background radiation back to the first months of the Big Bang.

Dr. Paul Strøm
The search for Earth-like exoplanets with PLATO
In this remarkable era of exoplanetary exploration, advances have been significant, many of which can be attributed to a series of successful exoplanet missions. These missions have enhanced our understanding of distant worlds, enabling the study of their atmospheres and the investigation of their formation and evolution. What we have learned has provided valuable constraints for theoretical models and made it possible to compare the discoveries with the planets within our own solar system. What we've observed is a remarkable diversity of exoplanets, reminiscent of planets found in science fiction novels.
Yet, amidst all this discovery, the endeavour to detect Earth-like exoplanets orbiting solar analogs has remained an elusive frontier. ESA's PLATO mission is set to address this challenge. Comprising of a space based telescope and a network of ground based telescopes, PLATO will provide well characterised systems which includes terrestrial planets and their host stars. Not only will this significantly contribute to the field of exoplanets, it will also provide us with the most suitable planets for looking for life as we know it.

Kris Zarb Adami
SETI from the Moon
In this talk, I will briefly describe the advantages of the low-noise environment that the lunar surface provides and how this can be used to eliminate spurious RFI signals that are received on Earth, by using the Lunar measurements as a background. A simple experiment consisting of one antenna could already be instrumental in identifying signals that originate from extra-terrestrial intelligence.

Eamonn Kerins
SETI opportunities with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman) will be NASA's next flagship mission after JWST, and is scheduled for launch in late 2026. Roman will be a 2.4m space telescope equipped with a near-IR camera that has similar resolution to Hubble WFC3 near-IR channel, but with more than 200 times the field of view. Roman is expected to expand the current tally of known exoplanets from around 5,000 to as much as 200,000. I will discuss how Roman could be used to conduct a SETI-optimized survey for habitable-zone rocky planets located within the Earth Transit Zone. I'll outline the game-theory motivated targeted-SETI strategy of Mutual Detectability to explain why technological civilizations on these planets might have elevated incentive to make contact with us.
Day 1 Session Talks
Days 2 and 3 Session Talks

Contact Us

Schedule

Jodrell Bank is a radio quiet zone, so Wi-fi will be restricted. Please bring a suitable adapter if you wish to use the ethernet ports and cables.

Hotels

Main conference hotels:

Additional hotels:

Coaches to SKAO will depart from the Alderley Edge Hotel and The Stanneylands and return in the evening.

Transportation

Public Transportation

Cabs/Taxis:

Parking

The main car park is marked as #5 on the map. The entrance is gated and requires a code. Please enter: #2023

Contact Us

Schedule

Monday 13th: Early Career Tutorial Day

Tuesday 14th: Workshop Day 1

Wednesday 15th: Workshop Day 2

Abstracts

Presentation Slides

Jodrell Bank is a radio quiet zone, so Wi-fi will be restricted. Please bring a suitable adapter if you wish to use the ethernet ports and cables.

Hotels

Main conference hotels:

Additional hotels:

Coaches to SKAO will depart from the Alderley Edge Hotel and The Stanneylands and return in the evening.

Transportation

Public Transportation

Cabs/Taxis:

Parking

The main car park is marked as #5 on the map. The entrance is gated and requires a code. Please enter: #2023