Slides from ActiveResearch meeting at RailsConf '09

1. Galaxy Zoo
Citizen Science on Rails
Arfon Smith

2. Citizen science?

7. :-(

8. :-)

13. 700,000
Images

14. 20,000
Users

15. 40,000,000
Inspections

16. Awesome

17. Astronomy?

23. 100
80
60
40
20
0
Professor

24. 10,000
7,500
5,000
2,500
0
Professor Paper

25. 50,000
37,500
25,000
12,500
0
Professor Paper PhD

26. 1,000,000
750,000
500,000
250,000
0
Professor Paper PhD SDSS

32. 70,000
60,000
Classifications per hour
1
50,000
Kevin weeks
40,000
30,000
20,000
Fukugita et al. 2007
10,000
0
0 6 12 18 24 30 36 42 48
Hours

33. 1,000,000
Galaxies

34. 170,000
Users

35. 70,000,000
Classifications

36. 70,000,000
Does it work?
Classifications

37. You bet

38. Clean Super Clean

39. Clean Super Clean

40. Clean Super Clean

41. better than the
professionals

42. 1. Collaborators not users
2. Contribute to real research
3. Don’t waste people’s time

43. Land K., et al., 2008, Galaxy Zoo: The large-scale spin statistics of spiral
galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
Lintott C.J., et al., 2008, Galaxy Zoo: Morphologies derived from visual
inspection of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
Bamford S.P., et al., 2008, Galaxy Zoo: the dependence of morphology and
colour on environment
Slosar A., et al., 2008, Galaxy Zoo: Chiral correlation function of galaxy spins
Schawinski K. et al. 2009, Galaxy Zoo : A sample of blue early-type galaxies at
low redshift

48. 250,000
Galaxies

49. 225,000
Users

50. 28,000,000
Classifications

51. 70,000,000
What ’s next?
Classifications

52. 1
#

53. Contribution
to research

56. Galaxy Zoo
Database

57. Galaxy Zoo Crow Zoo Moon Zoo Papyrus Zoo
Database Database Database Database

58. Task
Project
Annotation
User
Asset
Answer

59. Question 1
Question 2 Question 3 Question 4
Question 5 Question 6 Question 7
Question 8 Question 9

60. HAProxy
Web
Web Web
HAProxy
API API
MySQL Master MySQL Slave MySQL Slave

61. Questions?