Technology

The perennial optimists at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, have joined the rest of the world in deploying AI to help manage huge data sets — and their efforts almost instantly bore fruit. Seventy-two new &fast radio bursts& from a mysteriously noisy galaxy 3 billion miles away were discovered in previously analyzed data by using a custom machine learning model.

To be clear, this isn&t Morse code or encrypted instructions to build a teleporter, à la Contact, or at least not that we know of. But these fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are poorly understood and may very well represent, at the very least, some hitherto unobserved cosmic phenomenon. FRB 121102 is the only stellar object known to give off the signals regularly, and so is the target of continued observation.

The data comes from the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia (above), which was pointed toward this source of fast and bright (hence the name) bursts for five hours in August of 2017. Believe it or not, that five-hour session yielded 400 terabytes of transmission data.

Initial &standard& algorithms identified 21 FRBs, all happening in one hourworth of the observations. But Gerry Zhang, a graduate student at UC Berkeley and part of the Breakthrough Listen project, created a convolutional neural network system that would theoretically scour the data set more effectively. Sure enough, the machine learning model picked out 72 more FRBs in the same period.

A Berkeley GIF visualizing the data of a series of bursts.

Thatquite an improvement, though itworth noting that without manual and traditional methods to find an initial set of interesting data, we would have little with which to train such neural networks. They&re complementary tools; one is not necessarily succeeding the other.

The paper on the discoveries, co-authored by Cal postdoc Vishal Gajjar, is due to be published in the Astrophysical Journal. Breakthrough Listen is one of the initiatives funded by billionaires Yuri and Julia Milner, of mail.ru and DST fame. The organization posted its own press release for the work.

The new data suggests that the signals are not being received in any kind of pattern we can determine, at least no pattern longer than 10 milliseconds. That may sound discouraging, but itjust as important to rule things out as it is to find something new.

&Gerrywork is exciting not just because it helps us understand the dynamic behavior of FRBs in more detail,but also because of the promise it shows for using machine learning to detect signals missed by classical algorithms,& explained BerkeleyAndrew Siemion, who leads the SETI research center there and is principal investigator for Breakthrough Listen.

And if we&re being imaginative, thereno reason some hyper-advanced civilization couldn&t cram a bunch of interesting info into such short bursts, or use a pattern we haven&t yet grokked. We don&t know what we don&t know, after all.

Whatever the case, SETI and Breakthrough will continue to keep their antennas fastened on FRB 121102. Even if they don&t turn out to be alien SOS signals, itgood solid science. You can keep up with the Berkeley SETI centerwork right here.

Much like smartphone manufacturers, drone companies have been adding to devices plenty of features over the past several years while making only modest improvements to battery life. But while your phone may boast &all-day& usage, a lot of the top drones only register flight times between 20-35 minutes.

Impossible Aerospace is looking to change up that equation, at least when it comes to commercial drones, with a dense design that is basically all battery. The company shared launch details of its US-1 drone today, and announced that it had closed a $9.4 million Series A fromBessemer Venture Partners, Eclipse Venturesand Airbus Ventures.

Its first product is a drone that can most notably stay airborne for about 120 minutes in optimal flying conditions, with a 75km (over 46 miles) straight-line range. It can carry 2.9 pounds of payload, but that drops the total flight time to 78 minutes.

For commercial customers, the added flight time can dramatically free up use cases, changing the mindset of operation from mission-based to much more exploratory.

The companywebsite has an almost comical X-ray diagram of the US-1battery makeup showcasing a design that just looks like a big &X& of battery cells. Around 70 percent of the 15-pound droneweight is lithium-ion batteries, the company tells me.

This is a design built for old-school drone pilots; in order to achieve their lengthy flight time they had to ditch some additional components, the most controversial choice probably being the lack of any onboard obstacle-avoidance sensors. &Every aircraft design is a compromise,& Impossible Aerospace CEO Spencer Gore told TechCrunch in an interview. &Therenothing thatharder than to figure out what features you will include for some users that hurts the performance for everybody else thatnot going to use them.&

Gore said there were certain features the startup knew it wanted to drill down with its first drone and that the company had an &exciting product roadmap& of designs that made some different choices.

The US-1 starts at $7,500 and will ship in Q4 of this year.

Everyone could use an executive coach — even executive coaches.

Such is the thinking of Christine Tao and Lori Mazan, co-founders of Sounding Board, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based marketplace focused on leadership coaching that has so far raised $1 million in seed funding led by Bloomberg Beta, with participation from Precursor Ventures and numerous angel investors.

Some of these investors are people Tao met while an SVP at the mobile advertising startup TapJoy. TapJoy is also where Tao met Mazan, who has been helping companies develop their talent for more than 20 years. &Lori started out coaching our CEO, then coached me when I got promoted into the executive management team,& says Tao.

In fact, Mazan is continuing to coach some of the roughly 30 executive coaches who work with Sounding Board as contractors, and she isn&t alone, says Tao, noting that many of the startupsenior coaches work with more junior coaches. (Sounding Boardeight full-time employees also receive coaching.) &We definitely walk the walk,& says Mazan.

They also talk the talk, as we discovered in chatting with Tao and Mazan earlier today about the importance of coaching — and why more employers would be silly not to take advantage of it to help a range of people within their organizations.

TC: There are so many coaching startups. How do you distinguish Sounding Board from everything else out there

CT: We combine best-in-class coaches with a tech platform thatscalable and affordable and outcome-oriented. Italso a lot more cost-effective compared with other coaching platforms.

TC: How much more affordable

CT: A weekend of traditional executive coaching in the Bay Area costs between $25,000 and $30,000. We&re about a tenth of that price, and instead of sending someone to a workshop for a couple of days, you pay the same for six months of training with us.

LM: We&re modeled after traditional coaching engagements, including at Chevron, Genentech and a lot of other big oil and manufacturing and biotech companies where I&ve worked over the years. What we&ve done is take what worked at the top of the house and just bring it down to lower managers and senior leaders.

TC: You work with both big and small companies — from the Japanese giant Rakuten to venture-backed Quantcast. Which is the easier sale

CT: Hah. Both venture-backed companies and bigger enterprises go through huge periods of growth and they elevate folks into leadership roles in which they don&t have experience. High-growth startups innately feel the pain of having talented folks in roles for which they have no skills. On the other hand, public companies often are easier, given that they have a budget and they&re used to investing in training and developing employees.

TC: Do you tend to coach one person at a time or do you do your coaching in batches

CT: We typically teach a cohort over a six-month period, where the employees are meeting with a coach who has been chosen based on their particular needs and learning styles and [with whom they interact] via video or phone and who they engage any time through Slack or email. When a company on-boards with us, we collect a lot of data around key leadership values and goals, including from managers — they let us know what goals they have in mind for a personleadership development. And that person [who will be coached] provides us insights into their personal goals as well.

TC: For people who haven&t had coaching, it all sounds awfully squishy. What are some concrete ways in which the coaching will change based on the individual

LM: We have 12 developmental areas, and each is personalized for an individual. One of the most popular has to do with managing up and across an organization, meaning we work with people wanting to have influence with their manager and their peers and maybe even their managerpeers across the organization.

Every approach will be different, including based on whether the person is working in a very high-pressure, fast-paced environment or a more slow-paced and amiable one. Italso very different if you&re in engineering versus sales, for example. Letsay you&re in sales and you want to influence your boss. You might need to paint a bigger picture and give examples around how your vision will improve the quota you need to make.On the engineering side, itlikely that you&ll have to be very detailed.

CT: When Lori coached me, we worked on language I used when talking with one of my CEOs, down to incredibly minute details around the order in which I presented ideas. It made a huge difference. Whereas the feedback was that this person felt like I would dump my problems on him, by instead providing recommendations up front to him and offering many fewer details, he thought I was being more &solutions oriented.& The reality was that I was mostly sharing the same things.