In this week’s edition of our Who’s who in the Zoo series meet Becky Rother, who is visual design lead here at the Zooniverse.

– Helen

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Name: Becky Rother

Location: Adler Planetarium, Chicago, IL

 

 

 

Tell us about your role within the team: 

I’ve been the Zooniverse designer for a little over a year. In this role, I design custom projects like Scribes of the Cairo Geniza in addition to general Zooniverse.org and public-facing design needs. I also help organize public Zooniverse events here at the Adler Planetarium.

 

What did you do in your life before the Zooniverse?

I actually have a degree in Journalism, and have worked in various roles from newspaper page designer to mobile app designer.

 

What does your typical working day involve?

Being on the US team, there’s usually some catch up to be done from our UK colleagues involving reviewing an implemented design or answering questions on our Slack channel. Besides that, every day is different! I may design a giant banner one day, then the next work on wireframes for a new project we’re just getting started.

 

How would you describe the Zooniverse in one sentence?

Zooniverse is an exceptional group of people working together to positively effect science and the humanities.

 

Tell us about the first Zooniverse project you were involved with

The first custom project I worked on was the Anti-Slavery Manuscripts, a collaborative transcription project in partnership with the Boston Public Library. It’s a really special project for a number of reasons, and a great introduction to the Zooniverse community.

 

What are your top three citizen science projects?

I’m obsessed with our camera trap projects – Chicago Wildlife Watch in particular. It’s SO COOL to get to see actual animals in their native habitats. I also really enjoy Gravity Spy – as a non-astronomer, it’s neat to be able to help scientists study gravitational waves. Lastly, I may be biased but I really enjoy Anti-Slavery Manuscripts. Reading these first-hand accounts from people actually involved in the abolitionist movement during the Civil War really brings history to life.

 

When not at work, where are we most likely to find you?

Chicago has so many great music venues, so I love taking advantage of that and going to indie rock shows. I also love travel and will take any opportunity to explore somewhere new.

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Below is a guest post from Dr Philip Fowler, who leads our award-winning bug-squishing project BashTheBug. This project aims to improve the diagnosis and treatment of tuberculosis, which remains one of the leading causes of death worldwide.

This project has a huge amount of data to get through, so Phil is working hard to make sure this is being done in the most efficient way possible. Read on to find out more. 

– Helen

 

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Focussing effort where it is needed: picking out the Bugs that are harder to Bash

 

BashTheBug has been running for a little over a year now and in that time 11,303 volunteers have classified 834,032 images of the bacterium that causes tuberculosis growing on 14 antibiotics at different strengths. These images correspond to a bit less than 4,000 different samples of M. tuberculosis since each image is shown, by default, to different 15 volunteers to generate a consensus.

The goal of the larger CRyPTIC project that BashTheBug belongs to is to match all this data with the genomes of each and every sample and thereby produce the most comprehensive and accurate catalogue of what genetic variants confer resistance to specific antibiotics. This is important because there is a shift towards using genomic methods to diagnose which antibiotics would be best to treat individual patient infections because genomics can be faster, cheaper and probably more accurate as well.

 

Too many new images?

The CRyPTIC project has produced a new dataset of 4,286 samples. These have been collected from people with tuberculosis from all over the world.

This dataset alone would need 900,060 classifications if we were to simply require each antibiotic lane to be seen by 15 different volunteers and, unless a lot more people joined the project, would take at least a year. Our problem is the project is producing around 1,000 samples a month, which would require 210,000 classifications a month, which our volunteers at present could not keep up with!

Ultimately the CRyPTIC project will collect at least 30,000 samples over the next few years, so we are only at the beginning!

 

Some images are easy…

What might help is we’ve found that some of the images of bacterial growth are easy to classify. For example, all 15 volunteers identify well number 2 as the first well in which there is growth.

If the volunteers find this easy, a computer might also, so we wrote some computer software (called AMyGDA) that tries to measure the growth in each of the wells on the 96-well plate. It does a good job on these simple cases, but is confused by cases where this is little growth, or there are artefacts on the image, like air bubbles, contamination or shadows.

We can identify the “easier” images based on how much growth there is, and whether the computer software agrees with the single reading we have of each plate done by a laboratory scientist. On our new dataset of 4,286 samples, this approach identifies 84% of the antibiotic lanes as easy to classify.

If we only send the remaining 16% of images to the volunteers, that reduces the number of classifications we need to complete this dataset down to 144,000 with a monthly growth rate of 34,000 which is much more achievable!

 

…and some are hard.

But this means you will all be seeing images that are harder to interpret and classify and therefore should be more of a challenge.

This is an example of an image that is harder to classify.

In our existing dataset, these images have typically elicited a range of answers. Some volunteers might say they cannot classify the image, whilst others would identify a range of wells as being the first with no growth. We can, of course, still form a consensus (I’d say well 5), but the variation is itself telling us something about how and why the image is hard to classify, which is potentially useful (for example, for training a machine learning classifier).

 

A few things to think about

Because the images should be, on average, more challenging now, you will have to make more frequent judgment calls about whether that blob in well 5 is an artefact or whether it “looks like” growth, and if you think it is, whether or not it is big enough to be relevant. Personally, I’d say for something to be growth it has to look like the growth in the positive control wells. If it is a lot smaller (like a dot) then I personally tend to ignore it. Don’t spend too long on individual images – rely on the collective power of the volunteers to allow us to extract a consensus from all your answers!

 

Focussing your efforts

In summary

– there are a lot of new images available to classify on our Zooniverse project page and
– they should be, on average, a lot more interesting and challenging

 

To get more frequent project updates,

– check for banners on the Zooniverse project page
– follow BashTheBug on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook
– check out our blog

 

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Philip W Fowler
6 August 2018

I wanted to let you know that a new company called 1715 Labs has been set up to make commercial use of the software created by the Zooniverse team. Specifically, the company will explore how other businesses might make use of our tools in order to classify and label images, text, audio and video.

We’ve been approached over the years by a number of companies with such projects in mind, but the Zooniverse policy has always been to accept only projects whose aim is academic research. (See our policy statement at https://www.zooniverse.org/help/lab-policies).

This is not changing. This policy will remain the same for Zooniverse projects, so you can be sure that any project you see at Zooniverse.org will continue to have as its goal the advancement of academic research. Projects developed by 1715 Labs will not appear at Zooniverse.org.

It’s also important that you, the volunteers, know that the Zooniverse will not be handing the new company any of your data or personal information. Indeed, according to the Zooniverse privacy policy we will not be able to. Instead, the company will use the same software as the Zooniverse to reach other crowds who can take part in any projects it creates.

The team who have been working on the Zooniverse will continue to do so, just as they always have. However, the possibility exists that some team members – including myself – may serve as paid consultants for 1715 Labs as the new company gets off the ground. This work will be managed separately from work for us in the Zooniverse.

1715 Labs is formally a spin-out company of the University of Oxford, where a large part of the Zooniverse team have been based from the beginning. It is currently led by Sophie Hackford (We’re currently recruiting a long-term CEO – if you’re interested, send me a CV). Normally, the researchers involved in leading such a spin-out would receive equity in the new company, and benefit financially from it.

However, in this case, we have given up any such rights, passing the shares instead to another new organisation, the 1715 Association. This means – unusually for a spin out company – no-one involved in Zooniverse owns shares or has a financial stake in the new company. (As noted above, some of the team may end up working for 1715 labs as consultants).

The 1715 Association is what’s known as a company limited by guarantee. If it receives money as a result of its ownership of shares in 1715 Labs, it must use it in accordance with its objects. The objects of the 1715 Association are to benefit citizen science research, especially through the Zooniverse. Should the company do well, therefore, the result will be additional funding for our work here at Zooniverse.org and the chance to build new, better, more interesting projects.

This is good news – we want the excellent software our developers have created to be used, and if it can benefit our research, then so much the better. Hopefully, businesses with data that needs labelling will be inspired by this link to the Zooniverse to work with 1715 Labs.

I’m looking forward to seeing what happens with this new venture. In the meantime, I’m happy to answer any questions in the comments below or over on Talk.

Chris Lintott, PI for Zooniverse