Kevin Schawinski
Yale University
Monday, November
16, 2009
4:00 pm in SPL 57
Galaxy Zoo: Astronomy with over 230,000 collaborators
Abstract: With the Galaxy Zoo project, we have enlisted the help of over 230,000 members of the general public to classify images of 1 million galaxies taken by a robotic telescope as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. By distributing the task of pattern recognition to a large number of citizen scientist volunteers, we have been able to process an enormous data volume in a way that has not been possible before. I will discuss some results about galaxy evolution, cosmology and quasars that have come out of the first and second Galaxy Zoos and look ahead to some future citizen science-led projects that are at various stages of development as well as the future need to combine both citizen science and machine learning to deal with the even larger data volumes that will come from future surveys and experiments.
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