A Easy(ish) Measurement Framework: The Drake Equation for Online A2J Resources

Speakers: Sart Rowe, Brandon Thomas, Laura Quinn

What does measuring the effectiveness of A2J technology have to do with the search for extraterrestrial civilizations? They're both topics that are difficult to quantify, but benefit by a framework that a whole community can use to inform research and make educated guesses. In this session, we'll look at the recent work to apply the Drake Equation (originally created by Frank Drake to calculate the likelihood of extraterrestrial intelligence) to the A2J community-- which was funded by LSC, FJTC, and IALS with support from Pew, RAND, the Harvard A2J Lab, and others. We'll walk through a summary, examples of how to apply it, and a worksheet that you can use to adapt the Framework to your own project.