Joint Astrophysics Colloquium

Citizen Science: Getting the Best Science from Big Data

Lucy Fortson

University of Minnesota

Citizen science - the involvement of hundreds of thousands of people in the research process - provides a radical solution to the challenge of dealing with the greatly increased size of modern data sets. Zooniverse.org is the most successful collection of online citizen science projects which have enabled more than 800,000 online volunteers to contribute to over a dozen research projects. I will describe some of the science results to date from the Zooniverse collection of online projects, including the original Galaxy Zoo (Sloan Digital Sky Survey data) and Planethunters.org (data from NASA's Kepler mission) with a focus on serendipitous discoveries made by participants. I will then discuss future developments of the Zooniverse platform in the context of new approaches to machine learning to assess volunteer behavior with the ultimate goal of producing a system that can balance classifications from humans and machines in real time. Such efforts are critical in coping with data from the next generation of large-scale experiments, including the LSST and SKA.