>>AgataRozek, PhD Physics student, School of Physical Sciences
>>I was participating in NASA frontier development lab, which is an eight-week intense research programme and that was hosted by the SETI Institute in Mountain 
View in California in the United States. What we did was look into how we can use the most up-to-date machine learning tools in astronomy and my team was 
focused on modelling near-Earth asteroids from radar data and our team was made of four people, so two planetary scientists - I was one of them - and two computer
scientists and by combining our expertise we could come up with new efficient techniques in tackling that problem. It's normally a very involved process that requires a lot of time from the people that are doing it but by using machine learning we could make it much shorter, much quicker and much more efficient.  
>>So SETI Institute, the institution that hosted us, stands for the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence but actually they're not only working on looking for aliens, they're looking for any signs of life or any practical applications of astronomy in the search of life or in sustaining life beyond Earth. 
>>This opportunity came directly from my research that I do here at Kent: I work here on investigating near-Earth asteroids and because I was known in the
community, I was recommended to take part in that programme so the organisers contacted me directly and invited me to take part in it. 
>>Oh, the best bit about the programme was being in the Silicon Valley in the heart of the modern research in the computer science, it was really exciting. So, we had visitors - because we were in Silicon Valley we could have visitors from the big companies that work there - so we had people from Google and IBM talking to us about the newest techniques so the getting the hands-on experience with the most advanced people was the best part.
>>[I've] just submitted my thesis and I have a contract here at Kent so I'm going to continue my work on near-Earth asteroids here at Kent and hopefully develop this further.