about

Welcome to my open research site!

My name is Gemma Danks and I have a background in artificial intelligence and genomics. This is the place where I organise, document and share my open research projects, how I work on them and what I learn in the process. It combines an open science lab book with a knowledge base of tutorials, tips and advice that I hope will be useful to others.

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technology

Exoplanet technosignatures

The discovery of a technologically advanced civilisation elsewhere in the universe would be monumental and the repercussions would extend millenia into the future as humanity (or its biological or technological descendants) embarks on interstellar travel. I have chosen this topic as my next research focus and I will be documenting my journey towards making a contribution to the field.

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research process

How to choose a research topic

The main value of research comes from sharing it with others. I also want to share the process so I am documenting every step in the research cycle - starting with how I decide what to work on.

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Recent Posts

Project Cyclops - Part II

17 minute read

This is my second post on Project Cyclops, a NASA study from 1971 that proposed a system for detecting extraterrestrial intelligence. These are my notes from...

Project Cyclops - Part I

25 minute read

The Cyclops study was a 1971 Summer Faulty Fellowship Program in Engineering Systems Design, funded by NASA in cooperation with the American Society for Engi...

Waiting times and longevity

6 minute read

Around the same time as several other papers proposing how best to conduct a search for extraterrrestrial intelligence [1,2,3,4,5], Sebastian von Hoerner pub...

The Drake equation

9 minute read

Following the first formal proposal in 1959 by Cocconi and Morrison [1] that humanity was capable of detecting interstellar communications from other intelli...