This post originally appeared on Penn State News

In the "Princess and the Pea" fairy tale, a young woman must prove her status as royalty by detecting whether a pea was placed under dozens of mattresses during her sleep. What if she used deep learning to detect that pea? That’s the approach taken by Doug Cowen, professor of physics and astronomy & astrophysics, and his research group, who are trying to detect nearly imperceptible particles, called neutrinos, arriving at the Earth from distant galaxies. Thanks to Penn State’s growing partnership with technology leader IBM, the Cowen group is now able to scale up their research to detect more neutrinos, helping to further improve our understanding of the cosmos.

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