Zooniverse Approaching 1 Billion Classification Milestone
Professor Lucy Fortson of the School of Physics and Astronomy is one of the founding members of the Zooniverse citizen science collaboration platform. Zooniverse connects over 3 million volunteers with research projects and provides an online platform for citizen scientists to accelerate research across the sciences by contributing classifications. The platform, which is the largest and most popular of its kind, is expected to reach the one billion classification mark by June 30, 2026. Zooniverse is managed jointly by the University of Minnesota, the Adler Planetarium (Chicago), and the University of Oxford (UK).
What began in 2007 as a way to help astrophysicists identify galaxies has expanded to help make discoveries in biomedicine, history, zoology, environmental science and archeology. Zooniverse projects have led to many unexpected and scientifically significant results, and have contributed to over 600 peer-reviewed articles. Zooniverse projects make it easy for anyone, regardless of expertise or training, to contribute to real academic research on their own devices at their convenience.
Zooniverse addresses a major issue in the sciences, which is huge amounts of data needing to be sorted and classified. To accelerate this process, the Zooniverse platform can combine the strengths of both humans and machines as many of the projects ask volunteers to correct initial classifications made by machine learning algorithms. Discussion boards on the platform have helped create a community where volunteers can interact with each other and with scientists to help make discoveries such as a new type of galaxy, never-before documented behavior in wild animals, or how the nucleus of a cell changes shape during a viral infection. This collaboration between members of the general public and scientists has yielded more than just a billion classifications, there are projects that have powerful humanitarian benefits, such as the Planetary Response Network Project, which uses before and after images from natural disasters to provide fast, vital information for rescue workers, including the recent quake in Venezuela.
Fortson had this to say on the milestone,
When we went live with our first Zooniverse project nearly 20 years ago, never in my wildest dreams did I imagine we'd get to one billion classifications! But there is one thing I've learned in all these years and that is our 3 million strong volunteers are full of great surprises. I just want to take the opportunity to thank them - we couldn't have done this without you!