You can help a Mars Rover's AI learn to tell rocks from dirt – TechCrunch

Mars Rover Curiosity has been on the Red Planet for going on eight years, but its journey is nowhere near finished -- and it's still getting upgrades. You can help it out by spending a few minutes labeling raw data to feed to its terrain-scanning AI. Curiosity doesn't navigate on its own; there's a whole team of people on Earth who analyze the imagery coming back from Mars and plot a path forward for the mobile science laboratory. In order to do so, however, they need to examine the imagery carefully to understand exactly where rocks, soil, sand and other features are. This is exactly the type of task that machine learning systems are good at: You give them a lot of images with the salient features on them labeled clearly, and they learn to find similar features in unlabeled images.