Weird Galaxies and Wonderful Animals: Why Big Data Needs YOU!

This Week's Speaker: Lucy Fortson is an observational astrophysicist and a Professor of Physics at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Fortson is cofounder of the Zooniverse, a Big Data collaboration focusing on problems with too much complex data for researchers alone to properly analyze -- everything from lions in the Serengeti, to Higgs bosons and ancient texts from the Cairo Geniza.

 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 Tanzania to those from Astronomical Sky Surveys, helping to sort through massive data sets and contribute to making serendipitous discoveries within them.

Dr. Fortson’s lecture will take you on a quick tour of the engaging projects in the Zooniverse – from manuscripts from the Middle Ages to galaxies in the furthest reaches of time and space. Along the way, she will describe the issues that researchers now face with “Big Data,” what crowdsourcing is and how combining human intelligence with artificial intelligence is revolutionizing how science is being done.

For information on the full series, please visit the Astounding Astrophysics webpage here.