Physics and Astronomy Calendar

Since July 2007, Galaxy Zoo has involved through the Internet ¼ million members of the general public in providing morphological classifications by eye of nearly a million galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Scientists utilizing this unique database produced by “citizen scientists” have published thirteen peer-reviewed papers to date and more are on their way. NASA and the NSF have recently funded an initiative called the Zooniverse to expand the Galaxy Zoo model and construct a virtual facility that centralizes the ability for researchers across many disciplines to utilize human perception and pattern matching acumen in data processing pipelines. In this talk, I will provide an overview of Citizen Science and describe why humans are needed to process the veritable flood of data arriving from telescopes, satellites, remote sensing devices and scanned print. I will then present the plans for the Zooniverse giving brief overviews of the exciting new “Zoos” we are launching over the next 18 months and describe some of the excellent education opportunities available through the Zooniverse.