When Machine Learning Can't Replace the Human

Gay: As an astronomer, I have to admit, my day-to-day life is sitting at home writing software to help us better understand our universe. Then, as a communicator of science, it just makes me so excited to come out here and tell you about the kind of stuff I get to do. As an astronomer, I use data; images, spectra, photos but taken with cameras that are sometimes orbiting our world and other planets, moons, asteroids. For a lot of my career, everything I wanted to study, everything I wanted to learn, I could do with software, a database, and sometimes some really clumsy-linked lists because that was C in the 90s. Along the way though, I got curious about all these other areas of science that are different from mine. It was from the planetary-science community where I've somehow migrated over the years that I learned there are people - such as the folks who are today mapping out planet classic Pluto - that the way they do their analysis of the geological features on this world are to sit around round tables with a screen and a Wacom tablet. They draw by hand what they perceive to be the boundaries between different kinds of glaciers, different kinds of mountains, different features on this distant world. This is science by hand because humans and software don't know what to make of Pluto but the humans can at least guess. There's a lot of science that works this way. One of the most disturbing things I learned is there is a brilliant scientist Stuart Robbins who, as his PhD work at the University of Colorado, drew three million circles - again, with a Wacom tablet; go Wacom - three million circles on thousands and thousands of images of the surface of Mars. This ended up leading to a catalog of 600,000 craters. The reason he had to draw so many circles is he had to periodically remap regions to make sure that his bias hadn't changed over time. He had to map things at small scales, at big scales, at in-between scales, bridge across all of these, have overlapped between his image. Three million circles got him a PhD.