The Internet has enabled the public to participate in science in a way that was never possible before. Starting with SETI@home and a growing number of other projects that use the BOINC infrastructure, home computer users could contribute processing time to actual science projects and, in return, get a glimpse of some of the analysis that was being performed on their computers. But these projects left the public as passive participants, watching as their computers did all the heavy lifting. There are many problems where humans are actually better than computers, and a new set of projects is using the Internet to harness the abilities of non-scientists to contribute towards a scientific goal.
The best known project of this sort may be the highly successful FoldIt project, which turned protein energy minimizations into a game, enabling home users to help solve protein structures that could sometimes trip up a computer. But a number of other citizen science projects are being hosted on the Zooniverse site, named after one of its most successful projects, the Galaxy Zoo. Robert Simpson, a post-doc at Oxford, described the Galaxy Zoo experience at a recent Science Online meeting, and generously shared the slides from his talk.
Galaxy Zoo has been an attempt to get citizen science to classify all the galaxies present in various data sets, such as the Sloan and Hubble surveys, as elliptical, spiral, etc. in order to give astronomers a better sense of just what's out there. In the process, however, the citizens have also proven adept at identifying some unusual things that appear in these images and, in doing so, have contributed to the publication of at least five astronomy papers.
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