HCC Seminar Series: Weird Galaxies and Wonderful Animals: Why Big Data Needs Crowdsourcing to Find the Unusual in the Universe

Abstract

What do galaxies, lions, Higgs bosons and ancient texts from the Cairo Geniza have in common? Each of these research areas suffers from a similar problem: too much complex data for researchers to properly analyze. To make progress, researchers have turned to the general public to ask for help. Zooniverse is the largest online citizen science platform in the world, with nearly 3 million participants on over 450 projects performing tasks like classification or marking, on images from camera traps in the Serengeti to those from Astronomical Sky Surveys. Within astronomy alone, serendipitous discoveries with Zooniverse include new categories of galaxies and extra-terrestrial planets. But new generations of instruments are creating ever-larger numbers of images and other data that need to be classified. Machine learning can now do a lot of the tasks that humans can do – and they can do those tasks more efficiently. But can machines make serendipitous discoveries?  In this talk, I will take you on a quick tour of the engaging projects in the Zooniverse – from the Lions in the Serengeti to galaxies in the furthest reaches of time and space. Along the way, I will describe the issues that researchers now face with “Big Data”, and how harnessing crowdsourcing techniques to optimize the combination of human intelligence with artificial intelligence is revolutionizing how science is being done.  

Biography

Dr. Lucy Fortson is a Full Professor of Physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Minnesota. She is an observational astrophysicist using very-high-energy gamma-ray telescopes to study extraordinarily large jets of material emanating from supermassive black holes at the centres of galaxies. She is also a founding member of the Zooniverse project where nearly 3 million volunteers worldwide contribute to discovery research by performing data analysis tasks across a range of active online citizen science projects from discovering planets outside our own solar system to classification of cancer cells and animal species as well as transcription of historical documents. In her current work with Zooniverse, Fortson is leading efforts to develop algorithms that combine the strengths of both humans and AI to tackle Big Data challenges with citizen science. In 2010, Fortson joined the faculty at UMN in the School of Physics and Astronomy. Prior to that, she was Vice President for Research at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago and a research scientist at the University of Chicago. She received her BA in 1984 from Smith College in Physics and Astronomy, and her PhD in 1991in High Energy Physics from UCLA. She has served on numerous committees including the National Academy of Sciences Astronomy 2010 Decadal Survey, NASA’s Human Capital Committee and Astrophysics Science Subcommittee, and the National Science Foundation’s Mathematical and Physical Sciences Advisory Committee. She is a fellow of the American Physical Society, and member of the American Astronomical Society, Association for Computing Machinery and Citizen Science Association. Her awards include the APS Nicholson Award, NASA’s Exceptional Public Service Award, the University of Geneva’s Innovation Award and UMN’s CSE Community-Engaged Scholar Award.