Monthly Archives: August 2019

Technical

Live Coding the Zooniverse

Leave a comment

Here at the Zooniverse, we make scientific discovery accessible to the community. Now, we’re incorporating that philosophy into our software engineering.

Our mobile developer, Chelsea Troy, live streams some of her development work on the Zooniverse Mobile App (available on the Apple App Store for iOS and Google Play for Android). This means that you can watch her as she codes, and you can even submit questions and suggestions while she is working!  For an introduction to the App and Chelsea’s code development efforts, check out this YouTube video.

Why did we decide to try out live coding? Chelsea talks a little bit about that decision in this blog post. Among the reasons: live coding videos are a great way to attract and recruit possible open source contributors whose work on the Zooniverse mobile app and other codebases could greatly benefit the Zooniverse.

After each live stream, a recording of the session will remain on YouTube. Chelsea also publishes show notes for each stream that include a link to the video, a link to the pull request created in the video, an outline of what we covered in the video (with timestamps), and a list of the parts of the video that viewers found the most useful.

Sound interesting? Willing to contribute to Zooniverse open source code development? Keep an eye on Chelsea’s Twitter account (@heychelseatroy) and blog for future live stream events.  But go ahead and check out the recording of her first live stream and show notes to get you started.

For more information on the mobile app, see related blog posts:
Blog Entry: Notes on the Zooniverse Mobile App – New Functionality Release
Blog Entry: A First Look at Mobile Usage and Results

Featured Image Credit: Reddit/cavepopcorn

Education, News

U!Scientist and the Galaxy Zoo Touch Table at Adler Planetarium

Leave a comment

“Everyone try to grab the same galaxy,” a boy exclaimed while motioning to his classmates. Around the table, six students began dragging an image of a galaxy from the center of a large touch screen onto their own workstation. It’s very likely these students are the first people to set eyes upon this galaxy and decide how it should be classified. This kind of work isn’t reserved for astronomers in observatories or researchers in labs. Any visitor to the Adler Planetarium in Chicago can participate in real scientific research through the new U!Scientist touch table exhibit.

In July, the Zooniverse team finished their year-long development of a multi-person touch table experience and accompanying exhibit to remain on the Adler floor for several years. On the touch table, visitors participate in the Galaxy Zoo project (galaxyzoo.org), which provides valuable data to researchers in the U.S. and abroad by asking volunteers to classify galaxies by shape. In an effort to bring the Zooniverse experience to the Adler floor, the National Science Foundation awarded the Adler-Zooniverse team a grant to design a multi-person touch table experience, allowing guests to participate in the Zooniverse in a more social, collaborative way.

At the table, guests step up to their own color-coded workspace and select galaxies from an explorable image sliver of space in the middle of the table. Next, the guest must decide if the galaxy is smooth in shape, contains unique features, or isn’t a galaxy at all. After submitting a classification, the volunteer is shown a quick tally of how past volunteers have classified the galaxy. Adler visitors of all ages, from school groups to grandparents, are becoming quick Zooniverse volunteers.

U!Scientist includes some firsts for the Zooniverse, including the ability to collaborate directly with one another while classifying. When finding an oddly-shaped galaxy, volunteers can send the image to a neighbor for advice or begin a conversation with their group. Hopefully, these in-person conversations about science will spark curiosity and cause planetarium visitors to become active Zooniverse volunteers online.

Since cutting the red ribbon, guests are finding new ways to interact with the exhibit. Couples take the opportunity to compete with one another in classifying the most galaxies, facilitators explain the research process to campers arriving early to the museum, and children outsmart their parents by explaining the shape of galaxies using examples at each workstation. On average, Adler guests are responsible for over one thousand classifications per day through U!Scientist.

Want to see how the touch table app is doing? Visit uscientist.org to see a running tally of U!Scientist and Galaxy Zoo classifications as well as a world map of current classifications through Galaxy Zoo.

The U!Scientist touch table exhibit is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant #AISL-1713425.

News

How To Communicate With The Zooniverse

Leave a comment

Since the launch of our first project in 2007, the Zooniverse has grown and matured thanks to the tremendous contributions from our amazing community of volunteers around the world, as well as the Zooniverse web development teams and researchers based at the University of Oxford, the Adler Planetarium, the University of Minnesota, and many individual project research teams.  Together, these efforts have led to over 200 successful projects to date!

One of the features that makes the Zooniverse so special is that volunteers engage directly with researchers through each project’s “Talk” discussion forum. Not only have many breakthrough scientific discoveries been made through Talk (e.g., Boyajian’s Star), but equally important, it is the place where communities form. We love that this happens, and we strive to support an inclusive, nurturing community within the Zooniverse. Our fantastic Talk moderators play a central role in creating this supportive environment; helping to welcome and orient newcomers, answer questions, share insights, and focus the research team’s attention on questions and threads that particularly need their input.

Another way volunteers boost the quality of Zooniverse projects is through the direct feedback they provide on new projects before they launch. Over 50,000 volunteers have signed up to review projects during beta testing! The feedback these testers provide clarifies project tasks and goals, makes projects easy to use, and improves data quality. We take this feedback very seriously and important project refinements often emerge from this review process.  To sign-up as a beta test reviewer, visit your Zooniverse account email settings page.

In addition to engaging with the researchers through the project ‘Talk’ discussion forums and participating in the review process for new projects, we wanted to share additional ways to find information as well as share your ideas and feedback with us.

  • For FAQs (e.g., how to unsubscribe from emails, reset your password, etc.):
  • If you notice a bug/problem:
    • Email contact@zooniverse.org.In your email, include the web browser and operating system you’re using (visit whatismybrowser.com if you’re unsure).Please understand that the Zooniverse team is small and busy. We read all emails and take your feedback very seriously, but unfortunately we cannot directly reply to all of the emails we receive.

  • If you want to loop a Zooniverse team member into a Talk discussion when there is an issue that cannot be resolved by the project team:
    • Tag the Zooniverse team in your Talk post using “@support”.

  • If you have a general question and/or comment that’s not specific to an individual Zooniverse project:
  • If you notice a Security issue:
  • If you’re using the Project Builder Platform (zooniverse.org/lab) to build a new Zooniverse project and have a question:

Thank you so much for your contributions to the Zooniverse community!

Laura
Zooniverse Co-PI, VP of Citizen Science at the Adler Planetarium

News

Notes on the Zooniverse mobile app: A first look at mobile usage and results

Leave a comment

We’re happy that in the three weeks since the email newsletter advertising the Zooniverse Mobile App (available on the Apple App Store for iOS and Google Play for Android) we’ve seen a great response from the Zooniverse community!

Exciting Numbers

New downloads of the app show that Zooniverse volunteers are interested in contributing to projects while on their phones. Since July 15th, the iOS app has been downloaded more than 1,620 times, and the Android app more than 1,000 times. In total, the app has been downloaded more than 30,000 times since its first release!

When it comes to classifications, mobile workflows are making an impact. Since July 15th, over 30% of submitted classifications have come from the Zooniverse Mobile App — that’s over 800,000 classifications! These numbers show that there is a willing community of volunteers ready to contribute through their mobile devices.

How Zooniverse Projects Use the Mobile App

The mobile app is a great tool that’s been used in a number of different ways by Zooniverse projects. In some cases, a project’s entire classification task can be included in the mobile app — for example, check out Bash the Bug and Radio Meteor Zoo. For other projects, workflows hosted on the mobile app provide crucial help by sorting and filtering images. As an example, multiple projects use simple “Yes/No” questions to filter out and retire empty images, which significantly reduces the total number of classifications required for the project.

One example where this filtering technique was recently tested: the Local Group Cluster Search project, which is searching for star clusters in images of nearby galaxies. We examined how mobile-based classifications stack up to those made through the project’s primary drawing-based workflow by posting images in both mobile app and desktop browser workflows to make a direct comparison between the two. We show in the plot below that classifications obtained via the mobile app workflow agree well with those obtained through the drawing workflow, as shown by the trend highlighted by the red line.

2D histogram showing a strong correlation between the fraction of “Yes” responses to the mobile workflow question “Is there a cluster, galaxy, or emission region in the image?” on the x-axis, and the max hit rate (the fraction of people who clicked) for objects in the same image on the y-axis. The red line shows the trend in the data, where the “Yes” fraction and max hit rate trace track one another, representing agreement between the two sets of classifications.

This successful test demonstrates that filtering workflows in the mobile app can be used to identify blank images and retire these subjects quickly. In the case of the Local Group Cluster Search, we estimate that the number of classifications needed to complete the search will be reduced by 30% — that’s significant volunteer effort saved!

We look forward to the continued success of the Zooniverse Mobile App! Download the app today from the Apple App Store or Google Play. For more information on the mobile app, check out these blog posts.