Name: Ramana Sankar

Location: University of California, Berkeley

Tell us about your role within the team:

I’ve been with the Zooniverse team for two years now as a postdoc working with Lucy Fortson at University of Minnesota. My main role was to help with building human-machine interfaces for project teams on Zooniverse (particularly in the avenue of speeding up project completion rates and improving avenues serendipitous discovery), and also with providing data science assistance to projects.

What did you do in your life before the Zooniverse?

I did my Ph.D. at Florida Institute of Technology. My main focus was on studying the formation of thunderstorms on Jupiter. I was (and still am) interested in understanding more about the dynamics of the jovian atmosphere and how the fluid dynamics and chemical processes shape the cloud structures we see when we look at Jupiter. As part of this work, I also tried out a few deep learning approaches to reduce data from the JunoCam instrument and gained some machine learning and data science experience, which drew me to apply for the postdoctoral scholar position with the Zooniverse team at UMN.

What does your typical working day involve?

Most of my day is spent with code. I break my tasks into astrophysical research (focusing on Jupiter’s atmosphere), machine/deep learning (developing new models for the project teams that I am assisting) and working on aggregation utilities for project teams.

How would you describe the Zooniverse in one sentence?

A platform that reduces the barrier of entry for scientific pursuits

Tell us about the first Zooniverse project you were involved with

As part of my introduction to the team, a fellow postdoc at UMN and I was asked to create a test Zooniverse project to get a hang of using the Zooniverse project builder. We built the “Chi Square Kitties” project where we asked people to rate the fits of cats inside various containers. We scraped the web for cat images (there seemed to be a limitless supply) and asked a simple question of whether the cat inside the container was an underfit, overfit or a purr-fect fit!

Of all the discoveries made possible by the Zooniverse, which for you has been the most notable? (and why?)

I love the fact that the Gravity Spy team found a glitch class called “Air compressor” which was noise from a nearby A/C unit. This is the kind of discovery that is incredibly difficult (if not impossible) without having human eyes on the data. This is the kind of discovery which is fueled by Zooniverse!

What’s been your most memorable Zooniverse experience?

On the Jovian Vortex Hunter project, the volunteers came up with very creative names for some of the types of clouds that was observed. Some of my favourite ones are “red-compact-nursery” for subjects which contain very small red cyclones which seem to be forming in between the folded filamentary regions. These creative names (in my view) are actually much more useful than very descriptive scientific jargon, since it helps to create very interpretable labels based on what the feature looks like, rather than the underlying physics.

What are your top three citizen science projects? 

The best things about citizen science is that they cater to a very wide audience. Some projects can be highly accessible and can be done by basically anyone, while others require very technical expertise. There are a ton of amazing projects on Zooniverse which span this experience range, but I will pick some non-Zooniverse projects to highlight some of the reasons why I really love the citsci methodology:

1. JunoCam: the Juno spacecraft almost did not have a camera since it did not fit within the payload mass and budget constraints. Fortunately, a last minute decision was made to put a simple 4-channel camera (previously flight tested on the MSL) and not have a dedicated science team for the instrument. Instead, JunoCam relies on thousands of artists and hobbyists for downloading and processing the raw footage. JunoCam is a story to be told for the way it engages people, particularly artists, in scientific communication, and also how, now, there are several papers written on using the data processed by citizen scientists for new science!

2. PVOL (Planetary Virtual Observatory and Laboratory): This is a website for amateur observers to post their observation of giant planets to a centralized server which can be used by research to provide contextual information to any related studies. PVOL has helped fueled a lot of research into giant planet atmospheres, especially in the context of long cadence studies (longevity of features, periodicity of instabilities) and also in very short term (e.g., meteor impacts, etc.) This is a very useful way to use a very skilled hobby (astrophotography) for an extremely useful cause.

3. RadioJOVE: A project for interested parties to build and operate a simple multi-wavelength radio telescope. This was started as a way to observe Jupiter (and now other sources) in the radio wavelengths. What is amazing about this project is that it teaches a very niche skill (putting together and using a radio telescope) to non-scientists. Through the method of citsci, this project has made great strides in science communication and ways to inspire kids to pursue STEM degrees.

What advice would you give to a researcher considering creating a Zooniverse project?

Volunteers are not simply labelers. They do not replace a complicated algorithm, but instead provide value far beyond a simple classification. The greatest strength of Zooniverse is the fact that volunteers want to be engaged deeply in science, and that needs to be baked into the ethos of any Zooniverse project

How can someone who’s never contributed to a citizen science project get started?

Find your passion in science and search for local resources. For example, if you’re interested in ecology, there are probably conservation groups that could use your help with taking photos of local fauna and/or flaura. If you’re an astronomy enthusiasts, you can talk to the local planetarium, who can provide you with resources and ways to contribute. Finally, you can see if there are public seminars in their local university for departments related to their interest. These can help answer many of the questions you might have about the field.

Where do you hope citizen science and the Zooniverse will be in 10 years time?

I hope that the bridge between science and citizen science narrows further than it currently is. I hope that more research teams can use citizen science not only as a method to analyze and process data, but also as a way to drive science engagement and reduce the barrier of entry to research. I also hope that future spacecraft missions follow in the path laid by JunoCam and have a strong citsci component

Is there anything in the Zooniverse pipeline that you’re particularly excited about?

I’m really interested in how machine learning will play a role in Zooniverse. As the world heads deeper into the use of AI and automation, I am interested in seeing how Zooniverse will adopt these tools while maintaining efficiency, and more importantly, accuracy. Several projects on Zooniverse already use a variety of AI-based tools, so I am looking forward to seeing many more projects make use of these resources.

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

Either at home playing video games (catching up on my huge backlog which built up over grad school) or out hiking. I know these are polar opposites, but if I can get over the barrier of pulling away from my PC, I’m always ready to do a 5 mile hike!

Do you have any party tricks or hidden talents?

I learnt to sing Carnatic music, which is a classical South Indian music tradition, and I like to think I can hold a tune (although others can be the judge of that)!