Breakfast : 9 : 00 - 9 : 30 Session 1 : 9 : 30 - 10 : 20

There are two existing avenues to interpreting the diffuse ISM: the theorist’s approach in which real data is interpreted numerically in the context of simulations, and the observer’s approach in which objects are found and categorized by eye. We are pioneering a middle way, following the fast-growing science of machine vision to extract shape information from complex maps of the diffuse Galactic HI ISM. In this work we show a proof of concept in which newly discovered needle-like ISM features can be detected with a machine vision algorithm and shown to be oriented with magnetic fields in the ISM.