SkyandTelescope.com March 2014 19Find an
The rapid rise of computers, smartphones, and the
internet has led to a revolution of connectedness across
the globe and the nearly instantaneous exchange of infor-
mation. In this technologically wired age, more than 1
billion people use Facebook, devoting roughly an hour per
day on the website, and millions of people spend hours
every week fl inging birds at chubby pigs in the video
game Angry Birds. Imagine the science you could accom-
plish if you could tap into just a fraction of that collective
brainpower and apply it toward the unanswered questions
about the universe around us. This is exactly what the
Zooniverse (zooniverse.org) aims to do.900,000 Heads Are Better than One
The Zooniverse is a menagerie of crowdsourcing or
citizen-science projects using the combined power of
human pattern recognition via the World Wide Web to
tackle some of the most challenging questions in astron-
omy and planetary science. Humans are well-suited for
these tasks because we easily recognize patterns and spot
outliers. For example, we instantly identify the faces of
our friends and family members in a crowd. But such pat-
tern recognition is still a challenge even for today’s most
advanced computers.
Citizen science taps into this innate human ability
to analyze large datasets for projects that are diffi cult or
nearly impossible for a single scientist. Experiments have
shown that by combining the independent assessments
of multiple nonexperts, you gain the “wisdom of crowds,”
where the group opinion can equal or best that of a
trained expert, and in many cases, outperform the best
machine-learning algorithms. With the internet, scien-
tists can gather multiple volunteer classifi cations from the
hundreds to thousands of people needed to explore large
astronomical datasets that have been amassed with the
rise of gigabyte and terabyte computer storage.
The Zooniverse, led by Chris Lintott (University ofOxford and Adler Planetarium), started with Galaxy Zoo
(galaxyzoo.org) to identify the shapes of galaxies (S&T:
November 2011, page 24). It benefi ted from the fact that
humans are better than computers at distinguishing spiral
galaxies from ellipticals and at spotting galaxies with bars.
The Zooniverse now hosts the largest collection of online
citizen-science projects, with nearly 900,000 volunteers
worldwide participating to date. The Zooniverse has grown
from just galaxy classifi cation. There are now 23 iterations
of online citizen-science projects spanning identifi cation
of animals imaged in camera traps in the Serengeti (snap-
shotserengeti.org) to the search for star-formation bubbles
in our Milky Way (milkywayproject.org).
Each Zooniverse project turns those clicks into sci-
ence. All you need is a web browser; no special skill or
expertise is required. You go to one of the project web-
sites, watch a short tutorial, and then you’re off to the
races assessing real scientifi c data and actively contribut-
ing to the scientifi c process.TRANSIT SIGNAL In this screen shot from planethunters.org, the
unambiguous dip near the far right of this Kepler light curve is due to a
3-Earth-diameter planet transiting the star KIC 3425851.Exoplanet
Meg Schwamb
Planet Hunters2.indd 19 12/23/13 11:33 AM