U of M lecture explores impact of 'citizen scientists' on research
Zooniverse project involves more than a million volunteers from around the world
Who: Lucy Fortson, associate head and associate professor in the University of Minnesota School of Physics and Astronomy
What: Minnesota Institute for Astrophysics lecture about the impact average people can have on scientific research; lecture is free and open to the public
When: 7 p.m., Thursday, April 30, 2015; viewing of “Eye on the Universe” exhibit will follow the lecture
Where: University of Minnesota Bell Museum of Natural History, Auditorium, 10 Church Street S.E., Minneapolis
Register: The event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.
MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (03/25/2015) — The Zooniverse is an online portal to help researchers solve many kinds of problems like finding differences between types of galaxies, counting craters on the moon, learning about climate change from transcribing weather data in ships records from World War I, and hunting for planets outside our solar system that may even be like Earth. Each of these projects suffers from a similar problem—they require human visual processing of the data because there is too much complexity in the data for researchers to properly analyze by computers alone.
This engaging lecture entitled “Zooniverse and Beyond: How Crowdsourcing Science is Solving Big Data Problems in Astronomy,” highlights how average people can make an impact on complex scientific research.
By turning to the general public and asking for their help, researchers have been able to make progress on many problems. Zooniverse has more than a million volunteers from around the world who find fun and engaging projects that at the same time enable research. And some of these "citizen scientists" have made discoveries of their own that have led to scientific publications.
Join Lucy Fortson, associate head and associate professor in the University of Minnesota School of Physics and Astronomy, as she describes the wildly successful Galaxy Zoo project that led to the birth of the Zooniverse. She will focus on several of the discoveries made by citizen scientists and talk about how the Zooniverse team is building the technology to enable computers and humans to work in tandem, each doing what they are best at, to prepare for the 20 billion galaxies that will be imaged by the upcoming Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. Along the way, she will describe the issues that researchers now face with "Big Data," what crowdsourcing is and how it is revolutionizing how science is being done.
About the speaker:
Lucy Fortson, associate head and associate professor in the University of Minnesota School of Physics and Astronomy. A founding member of the Zooniverse project (www.zooniverse.org), and current Board Chair for the Citizen Science Alliance, Fortson is a leading expert in the field of “crowdsourcing science.” In addition to her work with the Zooniverse, Fortson is a member of the VERITAS and CTA very-high-energy gamma-ray astronomy collaborations. She and her team study Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) using multi-wavelength observations to determine the source of gamma-ray emission from AGN and the evolution of the AGN host galaxies.
Fortson was recently the Vice President for Research at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago where she held a joint research position at the University of Chicago. Fortson graduated with a bachelor's degree in Physics and Astronomy from Smith College, Massachusetts and received her Ph.D. from UCLA in High Energy Physics while working at CERN. She has served on numerous local and national committees including the National Academy of Sciences Astronomy 2010 Decadel Survey, the Astrophysics Science Subcommittee and the Human Capital Committee of the NASA Advisory Council (NAC), the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate Advisory Committee (MPSAC) for the National Science Foundation and the Education and Public Outreach Review Committee for the National Optical Astronomy Observatory.
About the Minnesota Insititute for Astrophysics (MIfA):
The Minnesota Institute for Astrophysics (MIfA) consists of 22 professors from the School of Physics and Astronomy in the College of Science and Engineering. The primary mission of MIfA is to carry out world-class research and education in the broadly defined areas of astrophysics, cosmology, and planetary and space science. Through these activities the Institute is contributing to the production of the next generation of scientists. MIfA scientists are engaged with research projects spanning the globe using facilities that they have designed and built, shared facilities such as the Large Binocular Telescope on Mt. Graham in Arizona, and international facilities such as NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.
For more information, visit astro.umn.edu.