Have you ever looked up to a starry night sky, seen a shooting star and made a wish? Well, look again and look carefully. Are you sure it is a shooting star, or could it be something else? Can you tell for sure? Well, maybe if your wish comes true, then you can tell with certainty that it was a shooting star, no? This Fall semester at New College of Florida, 7 students in the Applied Data Science master's program joined the world-wide effort in analyzing data collected from cameras watching the night skies.

When freak lightning ignited massive wildfires across Northern California last year, it also sparked efforts from data scientists to improve predictions for blazes. One effort came from SpaceML, an initiative of the Frontier Development Lab, which is an AI research lab for NASA in partnership with the SETI Institute. Dedicated to open-source research, the SpaceML developer community is creating image recognition models to help advance the study of natural disaster risks, including wildfires. SpaceML uses accelerated computing on petabytes of data for the study of Earth and space sciences, with the goal of advancing projects for NASA researchers. It brings together data scientists and volunteer citizen scientists on projects that tap into the NASA Earth Observing System Data and Information System data.