In this week’s edition of our Who’s who in the Zoo series, meet Coleman Krawczyk, who helps develop new analysis tools for Zooniverse data

– Helen

Name: Coleman Krawczyk

Location: University of Portsmouth, UK

Tell us about your role within the team 

I have been with the Zooniverse team for 4.5 years. I started out working as a front-end developer for two years and than switched to creating various data analysis tools used by the project teams.

What did you do in your life before the Zooniverse?

Before joining the Zooniverse I was a graduate student at Drexel University in Philadelphia getting my PhD in astrophysics.

What does your typical working day involve?

My typical work day involves researching new methods for analyzing data produced by Zooniverse projects, writing python code, and co-supervising PhD students.

How would you describe the Zooniverse in one sentence?

A collection of people working together to further our understanding of the world and the universe around us.

Tell us about the first Zooniverse project you were involved with

My introduction to the Zooniverse was reading the Galaxy Zoo 2 data release when I was in graduate school. I was so impressed by the project that when I was finishing up my PhD and saw a job opening as a Zooniverse developer I immediately dropped all my other applications and ended up submitting the Zooniverse one a month before the deadline (submitting anything early in astronomy almost never happens).

What are your top three citizen science projects? 

The Planetary Response Network – it is amazing to see the community come together to help out others in need.

Galaxy Builder – This project was developed by Tim Lingard (PhD student I am co-supervising) and has produced some amazing data to help us understand how galaxy spiral arms form.

Galaxy Zoo – This project is the reason the Zooniverse exists and paved the way for all the projects that came after it.

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

It is easier than you think to create a project.

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

In 10 years I expect the Zooniverse and citizen science in general will be more integrated with machine learning allowing even larger data sets to be processed (I’m looking at you Large Synoptic Survey Telescope).

Do you have any party tricks or hidden talents?

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

Playing video games, playing table top RPGs, reading books

This week, meet the Syracuse University Zooniverse User Research Group – a team that works across multiple Zooniverse projects to study many aspects of citizen science, including what volunteers learn through participation and what motivates them to contribute. 

– Helen

Research Team: Syracuse University’s Zooniverse User Research Group

Location: School of Information Studies, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York USA

What are your main research interests?

Our group studies user behaviors in Zooniverse. Our research is centered on (1) understanding the complex and emergent motivations of volunteers who contribute to Zooniverse projects and (2) investigating how amateurs learn via participation in projects. Our research covers users in Planet Hunters, Higgs Hunters, Asteroid Zoo, Seafloor Explorer, and Gravity Spy.

Who is in your project team? What are their roles?

Kevin Crowston, Professor

Carsten Osterlund, Associate Professor

Corey Jackson, Ph.D. Candidate

Mabi Harandi, Ph.D. Student

Amruta Bhat, Masters Student

Dhruv Kharwar, Masters Student

Isabella Valentine, Undergraduate Student (REU)

Tell us more about the data used in your research

Our data comes from system logs, Talk posts, surveys, focus groups, and interviews.

How do Zooniverse volunteers contribute to your research? 

Zooniverse volunteers are extremely valuable to our research and in turn, enhance our ability to suggest features that encourage motivation and support learning.

What are the biggest challenges in your research?

One of the biggest challenges is learning more about newcomers and dropouts in the projects. These volunteers are valuable contributors to many citizen science projects. However, because they do not stay with the project for very long, there’s not much opportunity to interact with them. Understanding why they leave and how we can encourage them to stay can help increase contribution to Zooniverse projects.

What discoveries, and other outputs, has your project led to so far?

We’ve published more than twenty full papers, posters, and other publications based on user research in Zooniverse. You can see the list here (https://citsci.syr.edu/papers).

Once you’ve finished collecting data, what research questions do you hope to be able to answer?

Our questions center on motivation and learning. For instance, when newcomers join a project, informative resources such as volunteer-created discussion threads might be hidden across the discussion forums. We’re trying to find methods to apply machine learning techniques to bring these to the fore.

What’s in store for your project in the future?

Currently, we’re collaborating with the Gravity Spy project to design more complex citizen science tasks. For example, in Gravity Spy volunteers come up with their own labels to name phenomenon in the spectrograms they classify.

What are your favourite other citizen research projects and why?

We’re most actively involved with Gravity Spy. We’re currently working with LIGO scientists to design advanced citizen science work. We hope this research leads to the inclusion of citizen science tasks covering more phases of the scientific research process.

What guidance would you give to other researchers considering creating a citizen research project?

One of the most crucial aspects of a successful citizen science projects is engagement by the science team. Answering volunteer question on the discussion boards, organizing Skype meetings, providing feedback and keeping volunteers abreast of progress has been shown to encourage volunteers to remain active.

If you’d like to learn more about Syracuse University’s Zooniverse User Research Group check out their publications here (https://citsci.syr.edu/papers).

In this week’s edition of our Who’s who in the Zoo series meet Grant Miller, communications and projects manager here at the Zooniverse. 

– Helen

Name: Grant Miller

Location: University of Oxford, UK

Tell us about your role within the team:

I don’t really have a solid job title. Sometimes I say communications lead. Occasionally it’s project manager. At points it has been community manager. I’ve been with the team for over 5 years and my role essentially involves talking to everyone (volunteers, project builders, the development team, and external researchers).

What did you do in your life before the Zooniverse?

I completed a PhD at the University of St Andrews in the search for, and characterisation of, exoplanets (planets orbiting other stars in our galaxy).

What does your typical working day involve?

Quite a few emails. A lot of working with people to help them build and run their project in the best way possible. Fantastic discussions with the other Zooniverse team members about how we can improve the platform.

How would you describe the Zooniverse in one sentence?

The Zooniverse breaks down barriers, leading to open research that wouldn’t be possible without the help of millions of volunteers worldwide.

Tell us about the first Zooniverse project you were involved with

I was a masters student doing a summer internship when Galaxy Zoo launched. I fell in love with it and did thousands of classifications one week instead of the work I was supposed to be doing.

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

People all around the world, of all ages, races, genders, and socioeconomic backgrounds will help you with your research if you just ask, and they’ll do it for no more than their desire to see progress.

What’s been your most memorable Zooniverse experience?

Earlier this year I was lucky enough to spend 3 weeks on an expedition to the Southern Ocean and Antarctica with the Penguin Watch research team, helping them maintain their cameras and monitor the penguin colonies. That’s hard to beat, but there have been many many other highlights over the last 5 years.

What are your top three citizen science projects? 

Plankton Portal (It was the first one I helped launch, and it is awesome. The images of the tiny sea creature are fantastic.)

Snapshot Serengeti (…and all other camera trap projects that followed. It was the original camera trap project on the Zooniverse and my first experience of the amazing and candid shots you could get of wildlife when they don’t think they’re being watched.)

Planet Hunters (it was the first exoplanet project we launched. On it the volunteers showed us just how awesome they could be when allowed to talk to each other. They discovered the first ever planet with 4 stars! I wish I had been smart enough to create a project like this to help with my PhD…)

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

You’re entering a huge collaboration with lots of wonderful volunteers. Treat them with respect and communicate with them as often as you would a professional collaborator. They will reward you with awesome discoveries and unrivaled effort.

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

Just click ‘Get Started’ on any Zooniverse project. they are designed to minimise the barrier to entry. All of the tasks are pretty easy to do, and most projects come with a short tutorial to help you.

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

In every household and classroom. But seriously, just more present in people’s thoughts when they consider research methods. We also need to get humans working with machines to go through even larger datasets.

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

I’m really excited to see what happens when we get humans and machines working together on the same datasets. This will allow us to do research that isn’t even possible with a large crowd.

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

Either exploring somewhere I’ve not been before, on the golf course, on the real tennis court, listening to music, watching football (‘mon Scotland!), or in the pub with friends. Preferably all of the above on the same day.

Do you have any party tricks or hidden talents?

I play guitar, but never do it in public anymore. I can also name all 50 US state capitals, which is pretty much useless. I’m above average at balancing objects (my record is 4 golf balls, or 5 pint glasses before being asked to leave the pub.)

In this week’s edition of Who’s who in the Zoo, meet Sarah Allen, a front-end web developer in the Zooniverse team. 

– Helen

Name: Sarah Allen

Location: Adler Planetarium, Chicago

Tell us about your role within the team:

I’m a front-end web developer and have been with the team for three and a half years. I’ve worked on a variety of projects including Chimp & See, Wildcam Gorongosa, Zooniverse Classrooms’ educational tools, Gravity Spy, and day to day maintenance of zooniverse.org.

What did you do in your life before the Zooniverse?

I originally did IT for a couple of medical schools involving Windows server management, Google domain management, application management, and general help desk. I eventually decided to learn to code and went to a code bootcamp when those first started getting popular. Then continued to self-teach as well as freelance before I joined the Zooniverse team.

What does your typical working day involve?

Usually first checking slack, email, and the Zooniverse talk board for any bug reports. Then I prioritize code reviews, following up to any pull requests I’ve submitted, then new feature development or learning about something new in the afternoon

How would you describe the Zooniverse in one sentence?

We empower researchers and the public to find answers to questions in real data.

Tell us about the first Zooniverse project you were involved with

Cyclone Center! My first project was implementing the project redesign and classification challenge.

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

Tabby’s star on Planet Hunters. It’s been one of my go to examples when explaining what it is that we do.

What’s been your most memorable Zooniverse experience?

Building and launching Chimp & See. It was a mostly solo project for me and although there was a learning curve and frustrating times with it, I felt very accomplished when it launched. I learned a lot from the process

What are your top three citizen science projects? 

Chimp & See, Planet Hunters, and Gravity Spy.

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

Do lots of prototyping and beta testing with the project builder before you launch so you have a solid idea of the data format going in and what the resulting classification data will look like. Have a timely plan on how to process the data and get that results back to the volunteers.

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

Seeing live music, dining out, playing video or board games, or cooking at home.

In this week’s edition of our Who’s who in the Zoo series meet Dr Sam Blickhan who leads the development of new Humanities projects here in the Zooniverse. 

– Helen

Name: Sam Blickhan

Location: Adler Planetarium, Chicago IL, USA

Tell us about your role within the team:

I’m the IMLS Postdoctoral Fellow and Humanities Lead. I started in March of 2017 as a Postdoc, and started to take on more Humanities Lead duties in 2018.

What did you do in your life before the Zooniverse?

Before coming to the Zooniverse I was a student. I did my undergrad at the University of Iowa, studying Medieval English Literature and classical Voice Performance. Then I did a Masters in Musicology at Oxford, and went on to do a PhD in Musicology at Royal Holloway, University of London, writing about the palaeography of medieval music notation. I’ve always been interested in technologies of writing and the development of language, as well as digital approaches to research and teaching, so being able to work on transcription projects with Zooniverse is a really great way to continue that academic work in a not-so-traditional format.

What does your typical working day involve?

Always coffee. Depending on what I’m working on, my day could involve communication with research teams, project planning/design/development with my Zooniverse colleagues, grant writing, data analysis, preparing conference papers & presentations, professional development, and/or researching & writing articles. It varies quite a bit from day to day, which I love — I never, ever get bored, and I get to meet lots of interesting people!

How would you describe the Zooniverse in one sentence?

Zooniverse is as much or as little as you want it to be; a way to relax, to learn, and engage with others.

Tell us about the first Zooniverse project you were involved with

When I was in grad school I used to volunteer on Seafloor Explorer as a way to relax — I felt like I could turn off the part of my brain that was doing lots of critical thinking, while still doing something productive and interesting. The first project I was actually a part of developing was Anti-Slavery Manuscripts.

What’s been your most memorable Zooniverse experience?

I’m lucky to be able to travel regularly for my job, and I love meeting people from other platforms and/or institutions and learning about how their crowdsourcing projects work. I was part of a panel discussion at the IMLS (Institute of Museum and Library Services) in 2017, and got to meet some people who have been doing really amazing work for a long time. It was exhilarating to be able to have conversations about public research methods and access to archival materials and data, and learn from these larger communities of researchers and advocates, as well as show them what tools and opportunities for research we at Zooniverse have to offer.

What are your top three citizen science projects? 

SCOTUS Notes (www.scotusnotes.org) is one of my favorite new projects. I’m a bit of a politics junkie, so reading the Justices’ comments can be a very interesting look at the thought processes behind these Supreme Court decisions. I think that the American Soldier project (https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/tkotwim/the-american-soldier) is also incredible. The soldiers’ responses to the questions are often very moving and powerful to read. Outside the Zooniverse, I’m a big fan of the Colored Conventions Project (http://coloredconventions.org/) — I was lucky enough to meet some of their team at a conference last year, and they do an incredible job of engaging their community in a positive way, and reminding the public how important it is to keep re-examining history and working to create space for those who have been overlooked. I’ve learned a lot from listening to them and watching their work.

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

Look at as many other projects as you can! Really spend some time classifying, but also try to get a sense of what the volunteer and research communities are like across projects. Reach out to other project owners, as well as volunteer and Talk moderators, and ask about their experiences. It’s hard to anticipate what it will be like to run a project if you haven’t yet participated in one. Learn by doing!

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

Since it’s summer, I’m probably outside running, biking, or on a patio with friends. I love to make things and enjoy knitting & embroidery in particular. Music is a big part of my life, too — I go to lots of concerts and play music with friends whenever I can.

You can follow Sam on twitter @snblickhan

In this week’s edition of our Who’s who in the Zoo series, meet Yassine Benhajali, who runs Brain Match.

– Helen

Project: Brain Match

Researcher: Yassine Benhajali

Location: Anthropology Department, Université de Montréal, Canada.

What are your main research interests?

How nature and nurture interact to influence brain functioning.

Who else is in your project team? What are their roles?

Sebastian Urchs, Aman Badhwar and Pierre Bellec (Project Supervisor).

Tell us more about the data used in your project

Brain Match uses images of brain that have been made freely available thanks to the efforts of The Neuro Bureau (http://www.neurobureau.org/) and the ADHD-200 consortium (http://fcon_1000.projects.nitrc.org/indi/adhd200/index.html).

How do Zooniverse volunteers contribute to your research? 

In general, manual quality control of brain images is very subjective and time consuming task. Zooniverse volunteers are helping us in two key ways; firstly, they are helping to validate our brain image quality control procedure, and secondly, to produce enough rated images to train computers to perform the quality control automatically.

What have been the biggest challenges in setting up your project?

Our biggest challenge was to build simple and comprehensive instructions.

What discoveries, and other outputs, has your project led to so far?

To date, with the help of Zooniverse, we have developed the first quality control procedure on brain imaging that could be performed by both novice or expert neuroscience raters. They both agree on most of the ratings. We are hoping to present this work at a conference soon (http://www.neuroinformatics2018.org/abstracts/).

Once you’ve finished collecting data, what research questions do you hope to be able to answer?

The next step will be to train machine learning model based on the information from Zooniverse raters, and to test if this model can perform as well as human rater.

What’s in store for your project in the future?

More data to rate, and other brain imaging modalities.

What are your favourite other citizen research projects and why?

I like all wildlife protection projects.

What guidance would you give to other researchers considering creating a citizen research project?

Make your tutorial clear and concise.

And finally, when not at work, where are we most likely to find you?

Biking, running and swimming.

In this week’s edition of Who’s who in the Zoo, meet Mission Director of The Plastic Tide, Ellie Mackay.

– Helen 

Project: The Plastic Tide

Researcher: Ellie Mackay, Mission Director & Drone Pilot

Location: London, UK

What are your main research interests?

Plastic pollution, aerial imagery and image object recognition.

Who else is in your project team? What are their roles?

Peter Kohler, Co-Founder.

Tell us more about the data used in your project

The photographs come from aerial surveys of over 40 beaches in the UK and worldwide.

How do Zooniverse volunteers contribute to your research? 

They help us to train the algorithm to detect plastics automatically – this is a huge task which requires lots of photo tagging, so the volunteers help immensely with getting through all these images.

What have been the biggest challenges in setting up your project?

Financial backing/funding! We’ve had to self-fund to get the project off the ground and we’re now looking for sponsors to take the project to Phase 2.

What discoveries, and other outputs, has your project led to so far?

Extensive media coverage on multiple national and regional media channels as well as social media. Informed a secondary project on the psychological wellbeing of beach cleaning vs online volunteering.

Once you’ve finished collecting data, what research questions do you hope to be able to answer?

Where is the missing 99% of ocean plastic? Which beaches are most polluted and why? Which types of plastics wash up on different types of beaches? What are the most common types of plastic marine litter? How does plastic marine litter vary seasonally/after storms/over time/following innovations?

What’s in store for your project in the future?

Securing funding for:

• Increasing the accuracy of the autonomous detection
• Gathering more imagery from global contributors. -Accumulating further tagging by volunteers through Zooniverse
• Creating greater public awareness through documentary, video and audio promotion
• Generating engagement in citizen science through educational programmes and public engagement programmes
• Creating an open source global map of plastic pollution.

What are your favourite other citizen research projects and why?

Everything on Zooniverse!

What guidance would you give to other researchers considering creating a citizen research project?

Definitely use Zooniverse if you can – it makes life a lot easier and gives you access to a whole network of dedicated and brilliant volunteers.

And finally, when not at work, where are we most likely to find you?

Travelling, diving, filming or photographing the great outdoors, Speaking at Adventure Uncovered, RGS or similar events, or at schools across the UK Promoting plastic-free living through my website and social media.

In this week’s edition of Who’s who in the Zoo Meg Schwamb tells us more about the Planet Four: Terrains project.

– Helen

Project: Planet Four: Terrains

Researcher: Meg Schwamb, Assistant Scientist

Location: Gemini Observatory, Hilo, Hawaii

What are your main research interests?

I study how planets and their building blocks form and evolve, applying ground-based surveys to probe our Solar System’s small body reservoirs and citizen science to mine large datasets for Solar System science.

Who else is in your project team? What are their roles?

Candy Hansen (PSI) is the PI of the project, K-Michael Aye (LASP) & Anya Portyankina (LASP) are also members of the science team.

Tell us more about the data used in your project

The images reviewed on Planet Four: Terrains come from the Context Camera (CTX) aboard Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The Context Camera takes black and white wide view images (~30 km x ~60 km with ~6 m/pixel resolution) of the Martian surface that we cut into smaller chunks reviewed on the site.

How do Zooniverse volunteers contribute to your research? 

We ask volunteers to review the CTX subimages of the South Polar region of Mars and identify whether they see specific features: (1) araneiforms (including features with a central pit and radiating channels known as ‘spiders’) carved by carbon dioxide jets; (2) erosional depressions, troughs, mesas, ridges, and quasi-circular pits characteristic of the South Polar Residual Cap (SPRC) which we collectively refer to as ‘Swiss cheese terrain’, and (3) craters.

What have been the biggest challenges in setting up your project?

Figuring out the format and contents of the classification exports.

What discoveries, and other outputs, has your project led to so far?

Our first paper was accepted last year to a journal. Planet Four: Terrains has identified new regions of carbon dioxide jet activity including areas with jet carved channels (spiders/araneiforms) on geologic units previously thought to be resistant to the process (locations the spiders/araneiforms weren’t expected to be). More details here (http://blog.planetfour.org/2017/08/29/planet-four-terrains-first-science-paper-accepted-for-publication/).

Once you’ve finished collecting data, what research questions do you hope to be able to answer?

What is the distribution of aranaeiforms (spiders) over the South Polar regions? Why do we find araneiforms (spiders) in specific locations outside of the South Polar Layered Deposits?

What’s in store for your project in the future?

Expanding to a larger search area and exploring areas further from the South Pole of Mars to see how far North spiders may exist.

What are your favourite other citizen research projects and why?

I’m currently involved in several Zooniverse projects, so I think they are all my favorites: Planet Four, Planet Four: Ridges, and Comet Hunters.

What guidance would you give to other researchers considering creating a citizen research project?

Be cognizant that combining the multiple volunteer classifications together is likely very different from what you’ve done in the past for data analysis. Also, treat your project volunteers’ as your collaborators.

And finally, when not at work, where are we most likely to find you?

Baking and watching soccer (hoping the Chicago Fire make the playoffs).

For more information, check out the Planet Four Blog Post.

In the third of our Who’s who in the Zoo series, meet Etch A Cell‘s Dr Martin Jones

– Helen

Project: Etch A Cell

Researcher: Martin Jones, Deputy Head of Microscopy Prototyping

Location: Electron Microscopy Science Technology Platform, The Francis Crick Institute, London, UK

What are your main research interests?

Imaging and image analysis.

Who else is in your project team? What are their roles?

Lucy Collinson (head of EM STP) leads the EM team, Chris Peddie (Principal Laboratory Research Scientist) acquired the data, Anne Weston (Senior Laboratory Research Scientist) performed the expert analysis.

Tell us more about the data used in your project

The images are from our “serial block face scanning electron microscope” and are of small groups of HeLa cells (a type of cancer cell). The electron microscope allows us to see objects down to a few billionths of a metre in size. Each cell is divided up into around 200-300 individual sections (like a loaf of sliced bread) so we can see the insides of the cell. To start with we hope to analyse around 50 cells, but as a core facility we have an endless supply of different types of data we’d like to analyse!

How do Zooniverse volunteers contribute to your research? 

The Zooniverse volunteers help us with our “segmentation” task – tracing a line over the nuclear envelope, which is a very important membrane inside the cell that separates the nucleus from the rest of the cell.

What have been the biggest challenges in setting up your project?

One of the key advantages of the citizen science approach is that we can have several different volunteers analyse each image, allowing us to combine the results to get a statistical understanding of the data. Combining the volunteers’ work in the most effective way possible turns out to be pretty tricky though! Especially since our data is stored as lots of individual lines, meaning a simple average doesn’t really work.

What discoveries, and other outputs, has your project led to so far?

The first thing we wanted to make sure was that the data we get is good enough, which thankfully it looks like it is! Even that was perhaps a bit unexpected to some people! We’ve found it has been popular as an education and outreach tool too, with reports of teachers using it in their classes to teach about cells. We’ve also shown it off at an event at the Natural History Museum in London and a CRUK event in Manchester and spoken about it at several conferences around the world. We’re writing up the first journal article about it right now in fact!

Once you’ve finished collecting data, what research questions do you hope to be able to answer?

While electron microscopy produces amazingly detailed images, there are very few studies where data has been fully quantified at large scale, since it’s such a labour-intensive process at the moment. By measuring the shapes of each object (nucleus, mitochondria etc.) in different types of cell we can perform robust quantitative comparisons that are not currently possible. This sort of knowledge will help us to understand many different diseases, like cancer, malaria and tuberculosis, as well as help us find effective treatments for those diseases.

What’s in store for your project in the future?

There’s a lot more to come from Etch a cell! We have plenty more data that we’d like to analyse in the same way – tracing outlines – but for some other objects inside a cell we think a different approach might be easier and more effective. We’re working on a few options, and hopefully future iterations will be easier for people to work with on mobile devices. In parallel, we’re also building an artificial intelligence system to use the results from Etch a cell to enable us to train computers to be as good at the task as humans.

What are your favourite other citizen research projects and why?

Bash The Bug was released at the same time as Etch a cell and is a really great project. EyeWire is another electron microscopy project that has been groundbreaking in the field of “connectomics” – trying to understand how the cells in brains are connected together. Cancer Research UK has produced several different projects with a great deal of success, it was our initial interaction with their team that brought citizen science to our attention in the first place.

What guidance would you give to other researchers considering creating a citizen research project?

Have a play around with the project builder, setting up a basic project is really easy!

And finally, when not at work, where are we most likely to find you?

I try to get outdoors as much as possible, whether that’s walking, running or cycling.