Life on Earth

Plymouth University has won a Pounds 10,000 research and development grant from the Wellcome Trust's SciArt competition for a project that will examine Earthlings' intelligence.

Researchers from the university's Science Technology Art Research group in the department of computing and the Centre for Neural Adaptive Systems will be collaborating on the project - "The Search for Terrestrial Intelligence" (STI) - with colleagues from ATR Media Integration & Communications (Japan) and the National Remote Sensing Centre.

STI turns the technologies that look to deep space for alien intelligence back onto Earth in a quest for "evidence" of terrestrial intelligence. Using satellite imaging and remote-sensing techniques, STI will scour the Earth using similar processes employed by Seti (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence).

Looking at Earth from space, the project will develop processing techniques using autonomous computer software agents. These agents will generate new images, animations and audio that will be accessible on the STI website.

Details: www.wellcome.ac.uk/sciart or www.CaiiA-STAR.net.