Date: June 29, 2011
Title: Citizen Science and the Zooniverse Project
Organization: The Adler Planetarium
Links: www.adlerplanetarium.org
www.adlerplanetarium.org/podcasts
Description: Zooniverse is the internet’s largest, most popular, and most successful collection of citizen science projects. Chris Lintott, Zooniverse Director, joins us for a discussion about Citizen Science and how Zooniverse got started!
Bio: The Adler Planetarium – America’s First Planetarium – was founded in 1930 by Chicago business leader Max Adler. The museum is home to three full-size theaters, including the all-digital projection Definiti Space Theater, the Sky Theater which utilizes a Zeiss optical projector, and the Universe 3D Theater. It is also home to one of the world’s most important antique instrument collections. The Adler is a recognized leader in science education, with a focus on inspiring young people, particularly women and minorities, to pursue careers in science.
Sponsor: This episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” is sponsored by — NO ONE. We still need sponsors for many days in 2011, so please consider sponsoring a day or two. Just click on the “Donate” button on the lower left side of this webpage, or contact us at signup@365daysofastronomy.org.
Transcript:
Mark
Welcome, to a special edition of the Adler Planetarium’s bi-weekly podcast, Adler Night and Day. The Adler Night and Day podcast provides listeners with a glimpse of what they can see in the night sky, solar weather updates, and riveting conversation with very fascinating guests! For the 365 Days of Astronomy we’ll be focusing on the conversation, and without further ado, I’m your host, Mark…
Katie
…and I’m Katie. And today we’re joined by Dr. Chris Lintott, regular listeners of 365 might already be familiar with Chris. He’s the principle investigator of Zooniverse and he’s the Director of Citizen Science here at the Adler Planetarium. Thanks for joining us, Chris…
Chris
My pleasure.
Katie
So, can you tell us… let’s start with citizen science. What is it?
Chris
Yeah, it’s a strange term isn’t it? Not quite sure where it came from or what it means. But what I mean by it is that it’s any process in which anybody, and not just professional scientists can make a real contribution to understanding our universe. So, think of citizen science vs. professional science. But hopefully, the two work together. A well designed citizen science project will have professionals guiding it and making sure that everyone’s work is useful.
Katie
Excellent! So how does Zooniverse play into citizen science? How does, where does it factor in?
Chris
So, zooniverse.org is a collection of citizen science projects, and they all share quite an interesting, modern approach to it. I mean, if you think about it, citizen science has been around, particularly in astronomy, for centuries. We’ve always had amateur astronomers making real contributions. Discovering supernovae, monitoring variable stars, all sorts of things for hundreds of years. But what they were typically doing was observing the universe. Reporting, what they saw. And then you sort of have astrophysics, where professionals sort of interpret those observations. Although, clearly there are people who cross over, but that was the old way. What Zooniverse does is reverse that process. So, data collection has become quite specialized and professional in astronomy. Whereas I used to go to telescopes to take my own data and go back to the university to analyze it. These days I’m just as likely to rely on a big survey to, a survey like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a telescope that hundreds of astronomers collaborated to build and use. It collects information from about a million galaxies and I just access it from my computer. And so did the citizen scientists through Galaxy Zoo. The most famous of the Zooniverse projects. So, you know, Zooniverse projects are citizen science but citizen scientist analysis. Because we’re asking people to look at data that’s been collected from elsewhere and interpret it. And usually using just the skills that they have because they’re humans, nothing special, there’s not any knowledge about astronomy, but the kind of pattern recognition that we evolved as a species to be very good at.
Mark
I think that’s really important, when you participate in one of these. You’re doing work that can’t be done any other way.
Chris
That’s right.
Mark
It can’t be done by computers.
Chris
I’m very proud of the fact that Zooniverse projects produce lots of education. I mean, we see that here at the Adler Planetarium, were we use them with school groups and so on. The point is that actually we need the help of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people to cope with this amount of data. And as you say, the typical object is, “couldn’t computers do this” but a lot of these tasks, computers are bad at. Think of all the effort that’s gone into, um, handwriting recognition programs for computers and they’re still not right.
Katie / Mark
Right… Yah, yah…
Chris
Whereas, I can read pretty much anyone’s handwriting. Not quite anybody… my brother’s is useless.
Katie / Mark
(Laughing)
Chris
But, you know what I mean…
Mark
Certainly better than a computer.
Chris
Exactly, so tasks, like picking out craters on the surface of the Moon, picking out spiral arms in a fuzzy picture of the galaxy, or even picking out the signs of star formation amidst the clouds of the Milky Way. These are all sorts of classic pattern recognition tasks that humans outperform computers on and so we know we get better results because we can use many tens of thousands of people, rather than letting my desktop computer churn through the data.
Katie
So, what started Zooniverse? Where did it come from?
Chris
Oh, well, that problem that I was describing of having too much data.
Katie
Yah…
Chris
And we had the specific problem was that we have millions of galaxies and we needed to sort them out into spirals and elliptical. Uh, tried doing it with a student, Kevin Kaminski, who’s now an Einstein fellow at Yale. Uh, he showed that it was important to have humans do the task. But also showed that it was nearly impossible to force one student to do it… a million galaxies is too many. And so that kicked off Galaxy Zoo. And, almost once Galaxy Zoo existed and had been successful… a lot of people will know this story, that on our first day, we were swamped, swamped with volunteers, once that had been successful it became rather obvious that we could expand this to many other fields. And my phone and my email have been ringing ever since with scientists saying, “look, I’ve got this problem, I’ve got all of this wonderful data,” whether it’s whale behavior or old documents, or astronomical images, or supernovae searches. You know, this problem of having too much data is actually something that’s confronting a lot of scientists right now. And so, sometimes you’re smart and you can improve your computing, sometimes you just need more people, and that’s what we’re trying to provide.
Mark
So, if you go to zooniverse.org, which I hope our listeners do, um… what will you find there? What are some of the things you can do?
Chris
Well, uh, we tried to provide as many projects as possible so that for everyone there’s a zoo. Some people like classifying craters on the Moon, but let me talk about one of our latest projects, which is a project called the Milky Way project. And so this is a survey of our galaxy to try an find star forming regions, so we have the data, it was taken by a big survey called GLIMPSE, which used NASA Spitzer Space Telescope. And if you look in the infrared you see these beautiful clouds of gas and dust. Deep within those clouds stars form. When those stars have just formed they go through quite a violent early phase of their life in which they can have a real impact on their environment. And one way they do that is that they blow out these bubbles of gas around them and once the star forms it evacuates the area of gas and we see this as a bubble. And so if we can find these bubbles, amidst this complicated patterns then we can do a census of star formation. And so that’s what the Milky Way project asks people to do. So you get to discover new stars that are being formed but you also get to enjoy these new images of our galaxy. They look like, I always thing of the background as sort of a Van Gogh painting. Think about the sky in Starry, Starry Night and you put that in red and green. That’s actually what the Milky Way galaxy images actually look like. So, it’s aesthetically beautiful but you can also actually make a contribution to science because you’re telling us where stars are forming.
Mark
And if you go there you can do it for ten minutes or ten hours?
Chris
Yah, just looking at one image is useful. People get addicted right?
Katie
Yah!
Chris
One of the things we’ve tried really hard in the Milky Way project and with some of our newer projects is to encourage people to go that next step further. So, classifying an image is great and you’ve made a contribution to science by doing that. But we know that people often have more to say. And that what they have to say about the images is also useful. That’s sort of a good way of also discovering the new objects, is to listen to people that have discovered something odd in the corner of an image. So we built a whole system which we call talk. So, talk.milkywayproject.org that allows you to go very quickly from seeing an image and drawing bubbles to saying, “I don’t know what this thing in the corner is” or “Has anyone else seen something like this.” And so we’re already starting to see some interesting things come from that. With Milky Way project these a whole class of objects that our volunteers call ‘yellow balls’ cause they look like small yellow balls. So, they’re small round blobby things that happened to be yellow in these images and we didn’t know they were there and we didn’t tell anyone to look for them but suddenly there was a group of people hunting and chasing them. And they turn out to be what we call, ultra comp…, some of them are ultra compact H2 regions, a little later in the process of stars forming. Where a massive star is heated up its gas so it’s glowing very brightly and it saturates the camera in the red and green parts and red plus green is yellow. And so some of these are these massive stars and most of those stars were known but there’s also ‘yellow balls’ that don’t have that signature and so we think these might be less massive stars and we’ve caught them just in the brief moment where they’re violent enough to heat up their surrounding areas and so this might be a very special time in star formation but we had no idea we could even look for these until our volunteers started collaborating and this is the sort of thing that happens if you let many, many minds loose on your data.
Mark
If only professional astronomers were out there doing this it might have been centuries before things…
Chris
Yah, maybe… once you know they’re there you might choose to go and look for them. Or have a student go to look for them. It’s a combination of having enough people to go through the data but also with people with the curiosity to stop and say “what’s that” which you sort of lose if it’s your job. Galaxy Zoo originally, when Kevin was looking through… I’m not sure he. He’d probably dispute this, but I think he’s less likely to make a random discovery than a group of volunteers because it’s a work task. His work task is to classify galaxies whether they’re spiral or elliptical. Whereas, people who are new to the data, who are in unfamiliar territory, you take the time to look around.
Mark
You’re naturally curious by being there.
Chris
Actually, there’s an interesting result on eye tracking studies, just very informally, very provisionally, actually. It was colleagues at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford who did this. So they were looking at where people look when you ask them to classify a galaxy. And when people are new their eyes go all over the image and so you can images that they might run into something in the corner or classify. Once you get into the habit then people focus in very quickly on the center of the galaxy and have a quick look ‘round and then they move on. And so if you’re in speculative mode then this means, I think one conclusion you could draw from this is that you’re more likely to make a discovery early on in your career cause you’re going to pay more attention to where you are. If you do the same walk to work everyday you stop paying attention to the new things. You become accustomed to, I mean I walked in this morning with my iPod on and headphones, looking forward cause I was thinking about this podcast. I think there could have been a dancing gorilla off to the side and I wouldn’t have noticed and so I love this idea that the benefits that you get from inexperience is rather wonderful and we get that in spades because we get that in spades, we get new people in the door everyday!
Katie
That’s fantastic! I love it, I’m addicted to Zooniverse! It’s great!
Chris
Good! As long as everyone else goes to zooniverse.org, there will be a project for you I promise! You just have to find yours.
Katie
Alright, well, thanks for joining us!
Mark
It was great having you on Adler Night and Day.
Chris
No problem.
Katie
And I want to thank the listeners of the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast. To listen to full episodes of Adler Night and Day please visit www.adlerplanetarium.org/podcasts, you can also look us up on iTunes. You can visit Adler Night and Day at our blog at www.adlernightandday.tumblr.com.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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