While crowdsourced research projects have proliferated in the last decade, there are few reliable platforms on which to build these projects.
Zooniverse, built by the University of Oxford and the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, is a free, open-source, easy to use platform with 2.5 million registered participants worldwide and over 450 projects to date across the full range of research domains. It has been used by researchers for classifying galaxies, transcribing historical handwritten documents, tagging animals in camera trap images, marking the structure of cells for cancer research, and more. The platform can be used with many different types of data: images, video, sound files, text, or JSON data blobs. It easily scales to handle large datasets. See the full list of currently active projects.
It provides a research-focused alternative to paid platforms designed for business data collection and processing. Zooniverse’s volunteer participants are motivated by contributing to science and humanities research. Zooniverse projects facilitate direct interaction between the public and scientists. Through the discussion forums, volunteers discuss their findings and the research projects they are working on alongside members of the research team.
Zooniverse also has infrastructure supporting the integration of machine learning methods alongside these human efforts. Zooniverse can be used to generate training sets, initially seed information for people to review, and/or iteratively learn from and incorporate human input to improve algorithms over time. By creating consensus results based on numerous classifications, Zooniverse produces reliable results that have led to hundreds of publications across the disciplines.
Northwestern University and Zooniverse
Zooniverse has deep connections with Northwestern. Dr. Laura Trouille, Co-PI for the Zooniverse and VP of Science Engagement at the Adler Planetarium, is a former postdoctoral fellow within Northwestern’s Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA). Dr. Cliff Johnson, Co-Director of Zooniverse, is a jointly appointed astronomer between the Adler Planetarium and CIERA.
One of Northwestern’s active Zooniverse projects is Gravity Spy. Since its launch in 2016, 10,000s of people have contributed millions of classifications to help identify and remove glitches from the LIGO gravitational wave detector. This data processing effort has helped make LIGO an even more sensitive and reliable instrument in detecting gravitational waves. Dr. Vicky Kalogera (Gravity Spy PI and Director of CIERA at Northwestern) and her team work closely with Dr. Aggelos Katsaggelos (faculty in the McCormick School of Engineering) and his team, alongside LIGO team members at CalState Fullerton and beyond, to lead the Gravity Spy project.
Free DIY Project Builder Platform
Zooniverse’s DIY Project Builder platform enables anyone to create their own crowdsourced research project for free. Through the user-friendly, browser-based interface, project builders upload their content and data, select among marking, annotation, and transcription tools, set up their discussion forum, export the classification results, and invite collaborators. All Project Builder built projects include a landing page, classification interface, discussion forum, and ‘About’ pages for content about the research, the research team, and results from the project. See the online tutorials and documentation for how to begin.
The Zooniverse Project Builder platform has been transformative. Prior to its launch in 2015, a Zooniverse project required months of professional web development time to build. The Project Builder has enabled the Zooniverse to go from launching 3-5 projects a year to launching over 50 projects a year for the past five years. And because it is free, it has democratized access to these research and engagement tools.
We welcome and encourage Northwestern researchers to use the free Project Builder platform to easily launch their own project without the need for extensive web development and engage 10,000s of people in helping to unlock their data. Don’t hesitate to reach out to the team at contact@zooniverse.org. The Zooniverse is happy to provide support for researchers using the platform.
See https://www.zooniverse.org for full details, or watch an introductory webinar on Zooniverse.