Technology:
Citizen Science Application “Galaxy Zoo”
Demo leader: Lee Lisle
Summary:
Galaxy Zoo is a citizen science application in the Zooiniverse collection of projects. Citizen science is a special category of applications that uses the power of crowds to solve complex science problems that cannot be easily solved by algorithms or computers. There are many different citizen science apps that you can try out on Zooniverse if you want to learn more about this field.
Galaxy Zoo asks its users to classify various pictures of galaxies from pictures from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, and the VLT Survey Telescope. Starting in 2007, this project has been so successful that it actually spurred the creation of the entire Zooinverse site. In fact, the Galaxy Zoo team has written 55 different papers from the data they have gathered from the project.
As an example of what they have discovered using crowd-generated data, the team created a new classification of galaxy based on the observation of the citizen scientists. After the workers found a pattern of pea-like entities in many galaxy pictures, the team looked closer at those formations. They found that the formations were essentially young “star factory” galaxies that created new stars much more quickly than older, more established galaxies.
Also, it’s interesting to note that the project started because a professor assigned a grad student to classify 1 million pictures of galaxies. After a grueling 50,000 classifications of these pictures done by one person, the student and professor came up with a solution to leverage the crowd to get this data set organized.
You can also create your own project on Zooniverse to take advantage of their over 1 million “zooite” user base. This is best used for massive datasets that need to be worked on manually. It also uses both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations for users through the benefit of science and giving each user a “score” on how many classifications they have performed.
Demo:
- Go to the Zooniverse website.
- Register a new account.
- Click on “Projects” on the top menu bar to see all of the citizen science apps available. Note that you can also search by category, which is useful if you want to work on a particular field.
- To work on specifically Galaxy Zoo, start typing “galaxy zoo” in the name input box on the right side of the screen (under the categories scroll bar).
- Click on “Galaxy Zoo” in the auto-complete drop down.
- Click on “Begin Classifying.”
- Perform classifications! This involves answering the question about the galaxy in the box next to the picture. It may also be helpful at this step to click on “Examples” to get more information about these galaxies.
