Protecting the world from destruction by asteroids sounds like superhuman power, but NASA scientists work tirelessly to ensure that humans today are protected from this potential harm. Asteroids need to be hunted in order to identify which ones may endanger Earth, and analyzing the big data puzzle of asteroid detection has been an arduous process. That is, until the power of crowdsourcing was discovered.
At this year’s South by Southwest, executives from NASA spoke on a panel about how amateur scientists have been empowered to make their mark on asteroid hunting. For so long, the ability to efficiently and effectively identify asteroids within big data sets has evaded even the most skilled aerospace engineers and experts. To solve this, the Harvard NASA Tournament Lab (NTL) developed its Asteroid Grand Challenge series with the help of Appirio’s crowdsourcing community of nearly 800K developers, designers and data scientists.
The goal was to attract the world’s leading developers to see who could come up with a better algorithm for detecting asteroids. NASA then used the winning submissions in several categories to create the algorithm for a single application, which continues to improve and streamline the asteroid detection process as it becomes available to the public.
We live in an age of remarkable scientific advances and innovation. More than ever, we are seeing the greatest minds in the world work together to develop new technologies and make discoveries that were formerly unimaginable. Appirio, a global cloud services company, makes the meeting of these great minds much easier by providing the platform where they can easily collaborate, consult each other and compete for the best results. This is how the power of the crowd took on NASA’s complex, data-intensive problems, conducting analyses and formulating actual, real-world solutions.
Crowdsourcing has emerged as a key driver of technical advancements and positive change in many industries over the past few years. Whatever the challenge or industry, the old adage always applies: two heads are better than one.
Today, the top crowdsourcing resources are transforming traditional development and creation, reaching an unprecedented level of innovation. This particular collaboration between Appirio and NASA is a great example of that innovation, not only allowing for professional scientists to quickly address and analyze the rapid influx of new data but also to promote excitement and participation within the scientific community. In many cases, the solutions that are created by leveraging the power of crowdsourcing may literally change the world.
Learn more about innovation through crowdsourcing.
Michael Morris is General Manager at Appirio.
