CitizenScience, Education, Studying the Zooniverse

Adler Zooniverse Summer Intern Experience: Dylan & Active Asteroids

September 14, 2022 The Zooniverse Leave a comment

By Dylan, Guest Writer and Adler Zooniverse Summer ’22 Teen Intern

Every once in a while, you get an opportunity that’s so cool, you sort of can’t believe that it’s happening. When I was told that I would have the chance to interview Dr. Colin Orion Chandler, a (then) grad student at Northern Arizona University, who is responsible for creating and leading the Active Asteroids project on Zooniverse, I was beyond thrilled. Every year, the Adler Planetarium in Chicago hires several interns to fill a variety of placements around the museum. As Zooniverse interns, Lola Fash, Tasnova, and I got to interview several researchers on three different projects: Transcribe Colored Conventions, NASA GLOBE Cloud Gaze, and my focus, Active Asteroids.

What are active asteroids, and why should we care?

An active asteroid pictured on the Active Asteroids project About page, on the Zooniverse website. The green circle shows where a coma would appear, and the white arrows point to the tail of the asteroid. (Photo Credit: Zooniverse)

Active asteroids are bodies that follow a typical orbit for an asteroid, but, when observed, they are seen to have comae, which are clouds around the object, and tails, which form when water, dry ice, or dust streak out behind the object. These bizarre objects are extremely rare, so we don’t know much about them, but their tails and comae lead researchers to believe that they might have water on them. According to Dr. Chandler, “Water gives us fuel power. Things that we need to drink, to live, gives us things to breathe. It lets us grow food. I mean, it does a huge number of things. But you have to actually know where you might find it and how hard it is to get out of there.”

The hunt for active asteroids

Studying active asteroids could yield remarkable amounts of scientific information, but they are so faint that scientists have trouble finding them. However, the Dark Energy Camera in Chile is sensitive enough to photograph these asteroids, and it sometimes catches an asteroid in part of an image when it was photographing a different object altogether.

To get data from these archived images, Dr. Chandler and his team break the images into chips, cut out the asteroid, and then focus and enhance the image so that, if there is a tail, we will be able to see it. Will Burris, one of Dr. Chandler’s students, has helped streamline this process. All of these steps have been automated so that computers can process the nearly 30 million images that could contain active objects, and narrow it down to about 10 million where the objects are most likely to appear.

The image above demonstrates the process by which the Active Asteroids team finds images of potential active asteroids before they pass the images along to volunteers who can better identify them. (Photo Credit: Zooniverse)

The next step in the process is to identify whether or not there is a tail or coma around the object in the image, and that’s where volunteers come in. Computers are unable to identify active asteroids with a reasonable degree of accuracy, so the task falls to human minds. But, because of the sheer volume of images, Dr. Chandler and his team are unable to process them on their own. Instead, they harness the power of the crowd to classify these images for them, so they can process the data in a reasonable amount of time. When we spoke, Dr. Chandler explained why he opted to go this route, and why he chose to use Zooniverse specifically, stating that, without Zooniverse “It [Active Asteroids] wouldn’t have been as successful, not even by a fraction.”

Once Zooniverse volunteers have fully sorted the data, Dr. Chandler and his team examine the results and single out promising candidates that should be followed up on later with different telescopes. William Oldroyd, in particular, helps with this process. One improvement he’s looking to make is discarding feedback from overly optimistic citizens. Some citizens flag far more asteroids as active than what truly exists, which can throw off the data collected by the Active Asteroids team. The observation and analysis team hopes that they will be able to separate these overly optimistic classifications from the rest, so that they can improve the accuracy of the data that comes in.

With a complete dataset, Dr. Chandler as well as his project co-founder, Jay Kueny, and their chief science advisor, Chad Trujillo, examine the results. If an object was flagged as active, they follow up in one of two ways; direct observation and archival research.

Studying active asteroids

Pointing a telescope directly at a candidate active asteroid to look for more signs of activity seems like the most obvious way to confirm whether or not it is active. However, this is often difficult for several reasons.

For one, many candidates are so faint that it can be difficult for even the most advanced telescopes, such as the James Webb Space Telescope, to pick them up.

For another, they can only be observed at certain times in their orbits, and those intervals are usually years apart. Even if an asteroid is visible, it might not be active at that time, since there are many different reasons that an asteroid becomes active, and they each result in different patterns in activity. In an impact event, activity is temporary and only associated with the collision. Likewise, in the event of a rotational breakup, which occurs when an asteroid spins too quickly and falls apart as a result, an asteroid will only have activity corresponding with breakup events.

The image is one that volunteers classified on Active Asteroids. This object has already been confirmed as active. However, if one were to look at it with a telescope right now, it might not currently have a tail, or it might not be visible at all. (Image Credit: Zooniverse)

The asteroids that are most likely to show repeated activity are asteroids that are active due to sublimation, a process in which, as the asteroid gets closer to the Sun, the frozen carbon dioxide and water on its surface turn into gas and form a coma and tail behind it. Although this is a recurring event, a formerly active asteroid will not always be sublimating, so even if it can be observed, activity might not be detected.

For all of these reasons, when an object is identified as a promising candidate for activity, researchers prefer to follow up by looking through archived images that contain that object. When we talked, Dr. Chandler referred to “archival investigations” as “instant gratification” since he did not have to deal with the limitations of direct observation, and he could immediately confirm activity and further investigate the object by using images that were already taken.

Dr. Chandler and his team have already used the results from Active Asteroids to find and study several promising objects, and they are in the process of publishing their findings.

Reflections on my experience

All in all, working as a Zooniverse intern and learning about Active Asteroids has been an amazing experience. Going into the interview, I was worried that Dr. Chandler would be unapproachable and difficult to talk to. However, he seemed more than happy to discuss his work with me, and we actually talked well beyond the time when I’d originally expected the interview to stop. We were able to talk not just about Active Asteroids, but also what it’s like to be an LGBTQ+ person pursuing a career in science. As a young trans person, I often feel like I lack a connection with adults in my community, so getting to talk to someone with an identity similar to mine who was successfully pursuing a career in the field I aspire to join was an incredibly powerful experience. I wish I had a larger word count and some more time since I feel like I could probably write a whole book on interning at the Adler Planetarium and studying the Active Asteroids project on Zooniverse.

When I originally heard about active asteroids, I was mildly intrigued, but not all that excited about writing about them. Although I love all things space related, six months ago I would have said that asteroids are just about the most boring thing in space. However, after having done this project, I’ve become enthralled by active asteroids, and small planetary bodies in general. The idea of all the smaller rocks, tumbling through strange orbits in all kinds of places around the Sun, some with water or other invaluable resources that we may never even find, has found a special place in my heart. I hope this blog post has given you a piece of that.

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Who’s who in the Zoo – Liz Dowthwaite

September 14, 2022 Helen Spiers Leave a comment

In our Who’s who in the Zoo blog series we introduce you to some of the people behind the Zooniverse.

In this edition, meet Dr Liz Dowthwaite, who is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham, and long-term Zooniverse research collaborator

– Helen

Name: Liz Dowthwaite

Location: University of Nottingham, UK

Tell us about your role within the team

I have been working with the Zooniverse off and on for about 3 years. I don’t have an official Zooniverse job title, I am a Senior Research Fellow in Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (https://www.tas.ac.uk) and Horizon Digital Economy Research (https://www.horizon.ac.uk/) at Nottingham, and am lucky enough to be able to spend some of that time working with the Zoo team. However, I have been called the ‘tame psychologist’! My work with the Zooniverse focuses on understanding how volunteer experiences can be enhanced to encourage continued participation and benefit the volunteer.

What did you do in your life before the Zooniverse?

Before working with the Zooniverse I was doing the same things I do now! I did BSc Psychology and an MA in The Body and Representation at the University of Reading, UK. I also worked in the academic library there for 7 years as a library assistant receiving all the shiny new books. I did my PhD in Digital and Creative Economy at Nottingham, in the Horizon CDT, studing online webcomic communities. I started as a Research Assistant in Horizon in 2016 whilst writing up my PhD, moving on to Research Fellow when I graduated in 2018, and recently won a promotion to Senior Research Fellow.

What does your typical working day involve?

I am a research psychologist based in a computer science department, so I study how people interact with technology. I mostly work from home in a tiny village in Oxfordshire, being frequently interrupted by two cats who would swear they have never been fed in their lives. I travel up to Nottingham about once a month to see my PhD students, and also to teach postgrads about digital footprints, responsible research and innovation (RRI) and experimental design. In my day-to-day I work across a range of multidisciplinary projects, for example online moderation and end-to-end encryption, trust in technology among people with mental health difficulties, benchmarks for measuring trust, and online wellbeing. This involves a lot of online meetings with my colleagues around the country, and lots of time spent reading things on the internet! Some of this is managing and planning the projects, some is conducting research – I write and analyse a lot of questionnaires!

How would you describe the Zooniverse in one sentence?

The Zooniverse is a force for good in the online world, allowing anyone anywhere to make a real difference.

Tell us about the first Zooniverse project you were involved with

I tend to study the Zooniverse as a whole but I last year I worked with some of the team at Science Scribbler: Placenta Profiles to help them to understand more about their volunteers.

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

I found a Supernova! Does that count?!

What’s been your most memorable Zooniverse experience?

When we run surveys with volunteers we often get some really lovely stories about what the Zooniverse really means to people, and I think that’s really wonderful. Our projects have connected people to their own histories and cultures, and made impacts on their current lives, which is really heartwarming and I love reading them.

What are your top three citizen science projects?

I don’t really have a favourite, I like to play with a range of projects. I tend to enjoy images and graphs the most. I was completely addicted to the original Muon Hunters, I saved all the images that looked like smiley faces, and it was really simple and quick and had a real ‘just one more’ vibe. I also love the University of Wyoming Raccoon Project because who doesn’t love trash pandas?

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

Think about how you can support and engage with your volunteers beyond just asking them to take part in the project!

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

Just get clicking! There really is something to interest everyone on the Zooniverse – explore the project pages and dive in. Most of the projects have excellent tutorials to get you started. Remember that it’s ok to get things wrong, many people classifying the same things leads to an excellent consensus and high quality data. And if a project isn’t for you, there is bound to be another one out there that you’ll love.

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

On the internet! But also reading the London Review of Books, drinking wine, or walking in the beautiful countryside around Oxfordshire – sometimes all of those at once if we find an awesome country pub! I’m also a keen cook (but not baker) and an extremely keen eater, and a reluctant runner (partly due to all of the eating)…

You can hear more from Liz on Twitter or on her blog.

CitizenScience, Education, News, Science, Studying the Zooniverse

Adler Zooniverse Summer Intern Experience: Lola Fash & NASA GLOBE Cloud Gaze

September 13, 2022 The Zooniverse Leave a comment

By Lola Fash, Guest Writer and Adler Zooniverse Summer ’22 Teen Intern

This summer I had the opportunity to be a Zooniverse intern at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, with two other interns, Tasnova and Dylan. As a group, we carried out a series of interviews with researchers leading Zooniverse projects. My focus project was the NASA GLOBE Cloud Gaze on Zooniverse. I led the interview with NASA scientist Marilé Colón Robles, the principal investigator for the project, and Tina Rogerson, the co-investigator and data analyst for the project.

Marilé Colón Robles (right) and Tina Rogerson (left) outdoors working on GLOBE Clouds. Photo Credit: Tina Rogerson.

NASA GLOBE Cloud Gaze is a collaboration between the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) Program, NASA’s largest citizen science program, and Zooniverse. When NASA began to study clouds to understand how they affect our climate, they launched about 20 satellites to collect data on Earth’s clouds. Unfortunately, these satellites are limited to only collecting data from above the clouds, which only paints half of the picture for scientists. They needed data from the ground to complete the picture. In 2018, they launched the first ever cloud challenge on GLOBE Clouds, which asked people all over the world to submit observations of clouds and photographs of their sky through the GLOBE Observer app. People responded faster than expected, submitting over 50,000 observations across 99 different countries during the month-long challenge. Because of the high volume, it would take months for researchers alone to go through each submission. So instead, they sought help, thus birthing the Zooniverse CLOUD GAZE project, where people help them classify these photos. Zooniverse participants classify the photos by cloud cover (what percent of the sky is covered by clouds), what type of cloud is in the image, and if they see any other conditions like haze, fog, or dust.

Why are clouds so important?

We see the immediate effects of these clouds in our atmosphere. For example, when you go out on a sunny day and the sun gets blocked by low altitude clouds, you feel cooler right away. But rather than looking at short-term effects, the CLOUD GAZE project is working to understand the long-term role clouds play on our climate.

Clouds play a significant role in maintaining Earth’s climate. They control Earth’s energy budget, the balance between the energy the Earth receives from the Sun and the energy the Earth loses back into outer space, which determines Earth’s temperature. The effects clouds have varies by type, size, and altitude.

Cirrus, cirrostratus, and cirrocumulus clouds are high altitude clouds that allow incoming radiation to be absorbed by Earth, then trap it there, acting like an insulator and increasing Earth’s temperature. Low altitude clouds, such as stratus and cumulonimbus, keep our planet from absorbing incoming radiation, and allow it to radiate energy back into space.

The classifications made by Zooniverse participants are needed to determine the amount of solar radiation that is reflected or absorbed by clouds before reaching the surface of Earth and how that correlates to climate over time.

In my interview, I had the honor to meet with NASA Scientists Marilé Colón Robles and Tina Rogerson, learn more about the NASA GLOBE Cloud Gaze effort, and hear their predictions for the future.

Clip 1: Introductions

This first clip is of Marilé, Tina, and me introducing ourselves to one another. Note: The other participants you’ll see in the recordings are Sean Miller (Zooniverse designer and awesome mentor for us interns) and Dylan and Tasnova (my fellow interns).

Clip 2: What prompted you to start NASA GLOBE Cloud Gaze on Zooniverse?

Quote from Tina from this Clip 2: “We have 1.8 million photographs of the sky. We want to know what’s in those photographs.”

Clip 3: What have your GLOBE participants been telling you about what they’re seeing in their local environments about the impacts of climate change?

What are your hopes and goals for this project?

In the interview, I asked them about their hopes and broader goals for the project. They talked about how in order to really understand climate change, we need to gather the best data possible. The majority of the data we have on clouds are from the 20th century. One of the project goals was to update our databases on clouds in order to conduct proper research on climate change. Tina Rogerson, Cloud Gaze’s data analyst, gathers this information and compiles it into easily accessible files. The files include data from a range of different sources: satellites, Globe observations, and Zooniverse classifications (see https://observer.globe.gov/get-data). They give people a chance to analyze clouds at different points and connect the dots to analyze the whole.

Scientist Marilé Colón Robles explained that one of the goals of the project is to make a climatology of cloud types based on the data they have collected. This would help us have a record on how the clouds have changed in a given location in relation to the climate of that area. We would have information on the entire world, every single continent, yes, including Antarctica.

Why did I pick this project to focus on?

I chose this project because I wanted to challenge myself. I have always shied away from topics and conversations about climate change and global warming. I felt I could never fully comprehend it so I should instead avoid it by all means possible. My fellow interns and I had three projects to choose from: Transcribe Color Convention, Active Asteroids, and NASA GLOBE CLOUD GAZE. If it were any other day, I would have chosen one of the first two projects to be my focus but I wanted to change, to try something new. The only way to grow is to step out of your comfort zone and I am so glad I did.

People make the mistake of believing that climate change can’t be helped and that after our Earth becomes inhabitable we can just pull a Lost In Space and find a different planet to live on. I had the chance to speak with Dr. Michelle B. Larson, CEO of Adler Planetarium, and we talked about how there isn’t another planet for us to go to if we mess this one up. Even if there was, it would take years and a lot of resources to ready the planet for ourselves. Those are resources and years that we could be spending on fixing our home.

The CLOUD GAZE focused on one of the most important and understudied factors in Earth’s climate – clouds. People all over the world are helping in their own way to help save the planet. Some make sure to always recycle their garbage. Some take public transportation more often, and switch to electronic vehicles to cut down on their carbon footprint. You and I can help by taking pictures of our sky, submitting it in the GLOBE Observer app, and by going to the Zooniverse Cloud GAZE project, classifying as little as 10 images of clouds per day to multiply the data on clouds, which in turn helps further our research and our understanding of climate change.

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An Interview with Jovian Vortex Hunters

August 26, 2022 The Zooniverse Leave a comment

This is a guest post by summer intern Anastasia Unitt.

Talking about the weather is a national pastime in England. When I meet Dr. Ramana Sankar on a sunny day in Oxford, we find ourselves discussing dramatic clouds and ferocious storms – in stark contrast to the empty blue skies above us. Ramana is telling me about the turbulent meteorology of our solar system’s fifth planet: Jupiter.

Jupiter is a gas giant. Its atmosphere is made of very different stuff to ours, predominantly hydrogen and helium, but it does have clouds of water vapour like we do, as well a variety of storms and hurricanes. These vortices are governed by the same physics as Earth’s own, just on a much larger scale; Jupiter’s most famous storm, the Great Red Spot, is twice the width of Earth and has raged for over 300 years. Wind speeds on the planet can approach 900 miles per hour at its poles, encouraged by jet streams formed by the planet’s 10 hour long rotations – the fastest in our solar system. For those interested in meteorology, it’s a fascinating place to study.

Ramana tells me that to research Jupiter’s weather he works with a very important colleague: Juno, a space probe launched in 2011. Five years later in 2016 it reached Jupiter. Ever since, it has been sending back data, including images which show a diverse array of weather formations, varied in form, swirling, morphing, spinning. I’m surprised by how many different colours appear in these clouds, not only orange as I expected, but also shades of blue and grey. The enormous variety of features in the images provide an opportunity to learn more about how storms work on Jupiter, and Ramana explains that to do this they need to collect observations of the weather captured in Juno’s images. There are thousands of these pictures, so he has enlisted citizen scientists on Zooniverse to look through them and annotate features. They mark storms, clouds, and anything else they notice, building a catalogue of formations. With their help Ramana can spot repeating patterns, as well as explore unusual or rare vortices.

*Swirling Jovian storms, in images captured by NASA’s Juno space probe.*

I find myself wondering what causes this dramatic Jovian weather, and according to Ramana astronomers are curious about this too. To answer this question, he says we need to go back to how the planet was made: “long ago, the sun formed and around it was this disc of gas and dust, which contracted to form different planets.” This compression generated enormous amounts of heat; even now, the temperature at Jupiter’s core is thought to be about 24,000°C, maintained by high internal pressure due to its immense size. As Ramana puts it: “Imagine a boiling kettle. Bubbles are coming up due to the stove heating the bottom of the pan. The storms on Jupiter are these bubbles, but rather than forming over two minutes, they form over 5-10 years.” This is in contrast to Earth, where storms form due to heat from the sun. I ask Ramana what this internally-originating heat means for his study of Jupiter’s weather, and he explains that this is something he is exploring. “The question comes down to: why are these storms distributed at specific locations, why is the heat preferentially pointed one way versus the other? Getting the catalogue of vortices and seeing where they’re forming can help us.”

With this aim in mind, citizen scientists have classified over 35,000 photographs of Jupiter’s stormy surface. When I ask Ramana what their best finding has been so far, he pauses for a moment before he responds, clearly spoilt for choice amongst the many complex vortices they have observed. He eventually lands on one particular feature: “One of my favorite types of vortex is called a brown barge, and that’s because you’d imagine vortices are generally circular, but a brown barge is very elongated. Imagine a brown cucumber, that’s essentially what it is.” Ramana explains that precisely what causes this brown colouration is a mystery. It could be chemicals present in the clouds themselves, or haze particles in the upper layers of the atmosphere reacting with sunlight. However, the citizen scientists have made an interesting discovery about these formations: “Volunteers are finding barges which are not brown. So for all this time I thought that brown barges are brown, but it turns out there are more complications. Investigating these not-so-brown barges is a new avenue for research.”

*Not-so-brown barges. On the left is an image of a typical brown barge. On the right are examples of barge-like vortices without the typical brown colouration.*

When not enthusing about Jupiter’s (mostly) brown cucumber-shaped storms, Ramana is quick to point to his citizen scientists as one of his favourite parts of the project. They’ve gone above and beyond their role as storm counters; some have even been digging into additional data, outside of what Ramana has provided. “A lot of volunteers kind of go into the depths. They’re pulling in all of this data from everywhere else, like news websites, even mission reports, things like that. [The] volunteers go out of their way to explore the data by themselves.”

It sounds to me like the citizen scientists have been understandably bewitched by Jupiter’s diverse and spiraling cloud formations. On the Zooniverse talk boards I can see them excitedly discussing all kinds of interesting storms and features that they have discovered. Now they have built Ramana’s catalogue of storms, I enquire what his plans are for the next steps. “The idea is to create a subset of interesting features (like the not-so-brown barges), and then either use some sort of numerical weather modelling code to study how these features formed, or we could get context images to all of these features: look one rotation before, one rotation after. How did the feature morph between those 15 hours?” He’s excited about the findings – the volume of data the citizen scientists have analysed means there’s plenty to explore going forward.

It’s fascinating to hear how much these volunteers have contributed to our understanding of the weather on a planet 365 million miles away from our own. For a while Ramana and I discuss the motivations of citizen scientists. Is it a desire to learn, an attraction to science, or simply a way to pass the time? Ramana says from his experience it’s a mixture of the three. “The bottom line that I personally have heard about from people who have done Zooniverse projects is that they just want to spend five minutes of their time doing something else that’s not for their daily lives. Log in, classify a few things, get back to work.” Unfortunately it’s also time for Ramana and I to get back to work, so we part ways. However, as I’m walking under England’s blue and (currently) cloudless sky, I find I’m carrying thoughts of Jupiter’s distant swirling storms along with me.

Would you like to be a Jovian vortex hunter? Follow the link to take part in Ramana’s project: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/ramanakumars/jovian-vortex-hunter

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Comic-Con and the Zooniverse

August 24, 2022 The Zooniverse Leave a comment

Guest post from Zooniverse participant Gracie Ermi:

San Diego Comic-Con brings together some of the biggest fans of the most popular shows, games, comics, and films. Science is a huge source of inspiration for a lot of pop culture, so myself and 14 other scientists from around the country decided that Comic-Con would be a great venue to showcase ways that science is making a difference in the world and how it relates to our favorite media. All 15 of us are national STEM ambassadors for the IF/THEN Initiative – a program focused on increasing access to diverse STEM professionals for students, especially young girls. In addition to putting on panels about the intersection of science and pop culture, we hosted a STEAM Fair (STEAM = Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math) that families in the area could attend even if they didn’t have Comic-Con tickets. At the STEAM Fair, each scientist demonstrated something from their specific field with a fun activity.

As a computer scientist who has worked on many wildlife conservation technology projects where data collection and annotation can be a big challenge, I am a huge fan of Zooniverse and the incredible generosity and human-power of this community. I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if kids who came through the STEAM fair could contribute to a real, active science project? Zooniverse was the perfect tool to use to demonstrate the types of projects I work on and to show kids that they can make a difference right now in wildlife research. I had kids identify animal species in images from the Snapshot APNR project – they loved it! Families were super excited to learn about Zooniverse (I handed out stickers so that they could remember the website if they wanted to keep exploring it at home), and some kids spent quite a while at my table, meticulously narrowing in on the species they were identifying. Everyone seemed to really enjoy getting to help out the Snapshot APNR project, and in the end around 2000 people came through the STEAM Fair over the course of 4 days. It was a huge success!

IF/THEN Ambassadors at the Comic-Con STEAM Fair. Learn more about the team at ifthensteamsquad.org!

Gracie Ermi facilitating a Zooniverse data labeling activity at the IF/THEN Comic-Con STEAM Fair

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Who’s who in the Zoo – Maysa Bashraheel

August 23, 2022 Helen Spiers Leave a comment

In our Who’s who in the Zoo blog series we introduce you to some of the people behind the Zooniverse. This week, meet Maysa, a developer in our Oxford team

– Helen

Name: Maysa Bashraheel

Location: Oxford University, but based in Manchester.

Tell us about your role within the team

This is my third week! I am the Zooniverse Developer Intern.

What did you do in your life before the Zooniverse?

About 4 weeks ago I was still a science teacher at a secondary school in Manchester – I came to my role after spending the last couple of years dabbling in coding and building stuff. I only realised I could potentially make a career out of a hobby in January. In a past life I was a Research Scientist for the Manchester Collaborative Centre for Inflammation Research (MCCIR) and specialised in Immunology with a focus on Transplants and specifically the heart. My bachelors is in Biomedical Science and I have a postgraduate degree in Education.

What does your typical working day involve?

Currently, I am learning a lot, I spend a lot of time familiarising myself with the codebase that makes up the Zooniverse. I am attempting to solve some issues, asking a million questions and exploring.

How would you describe the Zooniverse in one sentence?

The Zooniverse is a nurturing organisation that is committed to radical transparency and connects people from all corners of the world.

Tell us about the first Zooniverse project you were involved with

I think it was Beluga Bits! But I really have been fascinated by the Dental Disease projects and some of the interesting work around Etch-A-Cell. I think I have a thing for drawing projects.

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

The TESS Planet Hunters discovery planetary systems was cool. My personal favourite is the Galaxy Zoo discovery of Pea Galaxies (a class of compact extremely star-forming galaxies that look like green peas!)

What’s been your most memorable Zooniverse experience?

So far, the 2022 Zooniverse Team Meeting. Truly a wonderful and productive and just overall exciting experience.

What are your top three citizen science projects?

The Big Sleep Survey, Parasite Safari, Stall Catchers.

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

The volunteers are your biggest asset!

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

I’m hoping it will be a part of the Education system in a massive way. I would love if homework for students outlined contributing to a citizen science project and the curriculum actively involved scientists from a spectrum of backgrounds to inspire the future generation.

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

Hiking! My next hike will be up Snowdon in the dark so I can watch the sunrise.

Do you have any party tricks or hidden talents?

I can do some weird stuff with my tummy.

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Who’s who in the Zoo – Kat O’Brien Skerry

August 8, 2022 Helen Spiers Leave a comment

This week meet Kat O’Brien Skerry, our Public Engagement Officer, who has been taking Zooniverse projects into schools around the UK.

– Helen

Name: Kat O’Brien Skerry

Location: University of Oxford, UK

Tell us about your role within the team

I joined the team in January 2022 as a Public Engagement Officer and I work on a fixed term contract bringing the Zooniverse to schools and educational settings around the country.

What did you do in your life before the Zooniverse?

My background is in STEM education having originally trained as a physics and maths teacher. I moved from there into informal education and most recently spent 5 years at the science museum in London in their learning team.

What does your typical working day involve?

My role is split between delivering workshops in schools and developing those workshops and convincing schools that they’re a great idea. So some days, I will be in classroom leading hands on activities, getting kids stuck into the Zooniverse, or facilitating zoom calls with the researchers. Some days I will be trying out experiments and explanations on anybody who I can find who appears (reasonably) willing to play. Some days I have a bit more of an office life and I’ll be finessing what we’ve done, contacting schools and all that stuff..

How would you describe the Zooniverse in one sentence?

A one stop shop for citizen science.

Tell us about the first Zooniverse project you were involved with

I first used Galaxy Zoo as an activity in a STEM club that I was running and had just as much fun playing as the kids did. Being added as an editor on projects so that I could take on this role was pretty terrifying!

What’s been your most memorable Zooniverse experience?

The feedback from one of my most recent schools was just the best. I had one pupil ask me, wide-eyed, “Did I really do actual science?” and respond to my “Of course you did!” with “Wow, maybe I could be a scientist”. I could have cried. To me, Zooniverse is a way to get kids to see themselves as scientists and seeing that impact becoming real is wonderful.

What are your top three citizen science projects?

I’m biased by the two I work on, so Galaxy Zoo and Science Scribbler: Virus Factory. But I also have a real soft spot for the Davy Notebooks Project because I’m a big history of science fan.

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

Again, I’m biased, but think about if it could be useful in outreach!

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

Give it a go! There are so many great projects out there from annual birdwatching and insect hunts which you can do at home, to more supported projects in museums if you want a bit more help as you get started.

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

I’d love to see citizen science embraced as a way to make science education and outreach more meaningful for both schools and researchers, and Zooniverse as a means to do so.

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

I’m studying for an MA in Education at the moment (specialising in STEM education) so spend a lot of time in the library. Otherwise, I am found inexpertly herding and raising a small menagerie of children, chickens and chameleons.

Do you have any party tricks or hidden talents?

I can come up with a kid friendly STEM activity for almost anything. And will. Often without being asked.

News

Who’s who in the Zoo – Mary Westwood

July 25, 2022 Helen Spiers Leave a comment

In our Who’s who in the Zoo blog series we introduce you to some of the people behind the Zooniverse.

In this edition, meet Dr Mary Westwood, a recent addition to the Zooniverse team.

– Helen

Name: Mary Westwood

Location: University of Oxford, UK

Tell us about your role within the team

I joined the Zooniverse as a postdoctoral research assistant/project manager at the end of January 2022.

What did you do in your life before the Zooniverse?

I did a BSc and MSc in Biology at Wright State University in Ohio (where I’m from), then moved to the UK to do a PhD in Evolutionary Biology at the University of Edinburgh. Mostly I’m interested in how timing affects interactions between individuals, and towards the end of my PhD I started to dabble in bioacoustics and machine learning. Those last two topics are what led me to the Zooniverse.

What does your typical working day involve?

It varies a lot, but primarily I split my time between helping research teams get their projects up and running and doing my own research. I also get to write the weekly newsletters, which is a lot of fun.

How would you describe the Zooniverse in one sentence?

The innate curiosity and goodness of people put to very good use.

Tell us about the first Zooniverse project you were involved with

When I first checked out the Zooniverse, I wanted to see how bioacoustics projects were run on the platform. I can’t remember every project I looked into, but I do remember seeing HumBug and thinking what an incredible project it is.

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

Research from the Penguin Watch team and volunteers has led to additional protections to marine protected areas, which is a really awesome outcome from a Zooniverse project.

What’s been your most memorable Zooniverse experience?

Best memory: all of the project launches, they’re a lot of fun.

Worst memory: mistakenly thinking I’d changed the background image of the entire Zooniverse website.

What are your top three citizen science projects?

I love them all equally.

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

Just go for it. Start building a project, play around with setting up workflows. Delete them, start again. Don’t be afraid to reach out to us for help.

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

Browse which projects we’re hosting to see what sparks your interest. Download apps like iNaturalist and Merlin Bird ID – both awesome platforms which get you out into nature (win) and help science (double win).

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

Everywhere. Since discovering the Zooniverse, I can’t believe everyone doesn’t already know about it.

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

I’m about to experience my first Zooniverse Team Meeting. Very excited to finally get together with all of the awesome people I’ve worked with remotely over the past six months.

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

Somewhere outdoors and with a pint, possibly also with a book or friends.

Do you have any party tricks or hidden talents?

My party trick is strong-arming any topic of conversation into a discussion about circadian rhythms.

You can check out Mary’s Zooniverse project here: The Cricket Wing

You can hear more from Mary on Twitter.

Education

Zooniverse-Based Activities for Undergraduates Are Here!

July 13, 2022 The Zooniverse Leave a comment

Our pilot-tested, research validated, Zooniverse-based activities for undergraduates are here and are ready for widespread use in your undergraduate science classrooms! These activities are 75-90 minutes long and are intended for use in introductory, undergraduate courses for non-science majors (or upper-level high school courses). These activities have been developed for use in either in-person courses or online courses through Google Docs.

Geology/Biology/Environmental Science 101 with Floating Forests

In this activity, students learn about kelp forests in Tasmania in order to conduct an investigation into how marine ecosystems are impacted by small increases in ocean warming. Students use data generated by fellow citizen scientists in order to see how climate change has affected kelp forests specifically in Tasmania, Australia. In part one, students interpret graphs to draw conclusions about the relationship between greenhouse gas emissions and temperature, as well as learn about long term trends in Earth’s climate. Part two is intended to familiarize students with the Floating Forests platform. First, students practice classifying on a curated image set with a corresponding answer key. They will then be tasked with classifying images on the actual Floating Forests project. Part three uses data gathered by Floating Forests volunteers to introduce Tasmania, Australia as a case study of an ecosystem affected by climate change.

Astronomy 101 with Planet Hunters

This is another three-part activity where students learn about the discovery and characterization of planetary systems outside of our Solar System.

In part one, students use a lecture tutorial-style approach to learn about planetary transits and transit light curves. Students learn how important planetary properties such as orbital period and size can be approximated from specific features in a transit light curve. In the second part of this activity, students practice identifying transits (or dips) in a curated set of actual light curves. They will then receive feedback regarding whether or not they identified the transits successfully. Once the students have practiced, they classify on Planet Hunters – TESS, the current iteration of the Planet Hunters Project. Students get the opportunity to observe actual TESS light curves, and help the Planet Hunters research team identify potential planetary transits in those light curves. Finally, the activity concludes with a data driven investigation where students are presented with the complex research question, ‘Is our Solar System unique?’, and they will have to interpret data representations derived from the NASA Exoplanet Archive to form their own conclusion.

A Little More About These Activities…

The Floating Forests and Planet Hunters-based classroom activities have been pilot tested with nearly 3,000 students across 14 colleges and universities. Survey data collected from participating students showed that completing either one of these two activities had statistically significant (positive) impacts on students’ ability to use data and evidence to answer scientific questions, on their ability to contribute in a meaningful way to science, and on their understanding that citizen science is a valuable tool that can be used to increase engagement in science. More than 70% of students claimed that these activities inspired them to come back and classify on additional Zooniverse projects! The results of these findings are being published in the Astronomy Education Journal (Simon et al., 2022, in review) and the Journal of Geophysics Education (Rosenthal et al., 2022, in prep).

Additional feedback from pilot instructors indicated that these activities were easy to implement into new or existing introductory science courses. A few of our favorite instructor comments:

“Being able to see and analyze the data and help with the entire research analysis process – students were very interested in that. They appreciated that it was real data. This is a real research project.”
“Well, there’s not enough time for me to say all the good things that I could say about Zooniverse. I think the benefit to the community, just the broader public, has been enormous. So I think these activities are fantastic, and sharing them, not only with colleges, but with high school and middle school educators, I think would be really beneficial. They’re fantastic.”

The full activities and corresponding activity-synopses are available on the Zooniverse Classrooms Page (https://classroom.zooniverse.org)! The development and assessment of these activities were part of a larger NSF-funded effort, Award #1821319, Engaging Non-Science Majors in Authentic Research through Citizen Science. A final activity based around the Zooniverse project Planet Four will be coming soon!

Also at classroom.zooniverse.org are two additional sets of materials, created through previous efforts:

Wildcam Labs
- Designed for 11-13 year olds
- The interactive map allows you to explore trail camera data and filter and download data to carry out analyses and test hypotheses.
- An example set of lessons based around Wildcam Labs, focused on using wildlife camera citizen science projects to engage students in academic language acquisition
- Funded by HHMI and the San Diego Zoo
Astro101 with Galaxy Zoo
- Designed for undergraduate non-major introductory astronomy courses
- Students learn about stars and galaxies through 4 half-hour guided activities and a 15-20 hour research project experience in which they analyze real data (including a curated Galaxy Zoo dataset), test hypotheses, make plots, and summarize their findings.
- Funded by NSF

For both Wildcam Labs and Astro101 with Galaxy Zoo, instructors can set up private classrooms, invite students to join, curate data sets, and access guided activities and supporting educational resources.

volunteering

Science Scribbler: Key2Cat Update from Nanoparticle Picking Workflow

May 11, 2022 The Zooniverse Leave a comment

Science Scribbler: Key2Cat Update from Nanoparticle Picking Workflow

Hi!

This is the Science Scribbler Team with some exciting news from our latest project: Key2Cat! We have been blown away by the incredible support of this community – hundreds of you have taken part in the Key2Cat project (https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/msbrhonclif/science-scribbler-key2cat) and helped to pick nanoparticles in our electron microscopy images of catalyst nanoparticles. In just 1 week, over 50,000 classifications were completed on 10,000 subjects and 170,000 nanoparticles and clusters were found!

Thank you for this huge effort!

We went through the data and prepared everything for the next step: classification. Getting the central coordinates of our nanoparticles and clusters with the correct class will allow us to improve our deep learning approach. But before getting into the details of the next steps, let’s recap what has been done so far using the gold on germanium (Au/Ge) data as an example.

PICKING CATALYST PARTICLES

In the first workflow, you were asked to pick out both nanoparticles and clusters using a marking tool, which looked something like this:

As you might have realized, each of the images was only a small piece of a whole image. We tiled the images so that they wouldn’t be so overwhelming and time-consuming for an individual volunteer to work with. We also built in some overlap between the tiles so that if a nanoparticle fell on the edge in one image, it would be in the centre in another. Each tile was then shown to 5 different volunteers so that we could form a consensus on the centres of nanoparticles and clusters.

CRUNCHING THROUGH THE DATA

With your enormous speed, the whole Au/Ge dataset (94 full size images) was classified in just a few days! We have collected all of your marks and sorted them into their corresponding tiles. If we consider just a single tile that has been looked at by 5 volunteers, this is what the output data looks like:

With some thinking and coding we can recombine all the tiles that make up a single image, including the marks placed by all volunteers that contributed to the image:

Wow, you all are really good at picking out the catalyst particles! Seeing how precisely all centres have been picked out in this visualisation is quite impressive. You may notice that there are more than 5 marks per nanoparticle – this is because of the overlap that we mentioned earlier. When taking the overlap into consideration, this means that each nanoparticle should be seen (at least partially!) by 20 volunteers.

The next step is to combine all of the marks to find a consensus centre point for each nanoparticle so that we have one set of coordinates to work with. There are numerous ways of doing this. One of the first that has given us good results is an unsupervised k-means algorithm [1]. This algorithm looks at all of the marks on the image and tries to find clusters of marks that are close to each other. It then joins these marks up into a single mark by finding a weighted average of their placements. You can think of it like tug-of-war where the algorithm finds the centre point because more marks are pulling it there.

Reconstructed image with centroids of marks

As you can see, the consensus based on your marks almost perfectly points at the centres of individual nanoparticles or nanoparticle clusters. We don’t yet know from this analysis if the nanoparticle is a part of a cluster or not, and in some cases, we also get marks in areas which are not nanoparticles as shown in the orange and red boxes above. Since only small parts of the overall image were shown in the marking task, the artifact in the orange box was mistaken as a nanoparticle and in the case of the red box, there is a mark at the very edge and on a very small dot-like instance where some of you might have been suspicious about another nanoparticle. This is expected, especially since we asked volunteers to place marks if they were unsure – we wanted to capture all possible instances of nanoparticles in this first step!

REFINING THE DATA

This is the part where the second workflow comes into play. Using the marks from the first workflow, we createda new dataset showing just a small area around the mark to collect more information.In this workflow we ask a few questions to help identify exactly what we see at each of the marks

With this workflow, we hope to classify all the nanoparticles and clusters of both the Au/Ge and Pd/C catalyst systems, while potential false marks can be cleaned up! Once this is accomplished, we’ll have all the required inputs to improve our deep learning approach.

We’re currently collecting classifications on the Au/Ge data and will soon switch over to the Pd/C data, so if you have a few spare minutes, we would be very happy if you left some classifications in our project! https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/msbrhonclif/science-scribbler-key2cat/classify

-Kevin & Michele

Got your interest? Do you have questions? Get in touch!

Talk: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/msbrhonclif/science-scribbler-key2cat/talk

References:

[1]: M. Ahmed, R. Seraj, S. M. S. Islam, Electronics (2020), 9 (8), 1295.