Hope Klug has a question: What drives the astounding diversity of life found across the planet?
It’s the kind of question that fascinates a biologist like Klug. So she and her colleagues at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga opened that scientific can of worms and peered in “to answer really big-picture questions related to ecology, evolution, and climate change,” says Klug, associate professor in the Department of Biology, Geology and Environmental Science. “This project has allowed us to study biological patterns across all scales of life.”
First, though, they had to tackle another major issue. A gigantic amount of research already is out there, so it must be sifted through. But there’s so much information the project could slow to a snail’s pace simply by the amount of necessary reading.
They turned to UTC’s SimCenter, whose high-speed, high-capacity computers can bore quickly through mountains of data. At the same time, the computers learn as they go along, finding new connections, new questions, new answers. The ability is called machine learning but it’s better known as artificial intelligence, or A.I.
“What machine learning does for you is help you become a better scientist. It doesn’t remove your brain from the process; it helps you to look and look deeper and find things that weren’t obvious,” says Tony Skjellum, director of the SimCenter.