Galaxy Zoo Starburst Talk

zkChris talks about the Quench project

  • JeanTate by JeanTate

    "Where next for citizen science? Innovative uses for crowd sourcing", Streamed live on Jan 30, 2014:

    This seminar is part of the Oxford Martin School Hilary Term seminar series: Blurring the lines: the changing dynamics between man and machine

    Thanks to new technologies , citizen science has seen huge growth over the past decade, opening up important scientific research to the masses and harnessing the power of the crowd. Ranging from classifying new galaxies to monitoring wildlife in the Serengeti, the Zooniverse stable of citizen science projects led by Dr Chris Lintott has seen incredible success. But what does the future hold for citizen science -- does it have the power to help in real life situations such as disaster zones? And what are the implications when dealing with huge amounts of potentially sensitive data in real time?

    Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford

    Here's what zkChris had to say, starting ~51m25s (no promise that the transcription is error-free!):

    I just want to end by describing a project that I think gives you a different sense of the vision of where citizen science is going [...] We ran a project last summer called Galaxy Zoo Quench, and the tag line was that we wanted people to experience science from beginning to end [...] The sentiment was genuine, which is that we started with a Galaxy Zoo task, classify these galaxies, and then we gave people a set of advanced tools [sic] to explore the results, and about a tenth of the users who started classifying used the tools. And between them they discovered a genuinely new scientific result about how galaxies behave after they've merged. And they were able to produce the plots that you need to show that result. And a tenth of those people went on, and are now working with researchers on a collaborative online tool to write their own papers.

    Posted