British Science Week 2022: Astronomy Needs You!
How you can be part of astronomy's big data revolution
As part of British Science Week, we hosted a live panel discussion and Q&A where we talked about the connection between the coming “big data” era in astronomy and the increasing importance of citizen science projects for training machine learning models.
Open University research student Adam McMaster was joined by Stephen Serjeant , Hugh Dickinson, and Beatriz Mingo to discuss black holes, machine learning, and citizen science. We encouraged the audience to join us in working on one of our current projects, Black Hole Hunters.
During the event, the audience completed over 7,000 classifications and our total for the day was over 14,000 classifications! This is an amazing effort! Thank you to everyone who took part.
A recording of the live stream is available below:
Check out our other citizen science projects
60 Second Adventures in Artificial Intelligence
Learn more about machine learning and how we use it in our research.
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- British Science Week resources from the OU
- 60 Second Adventures in Astronomy: Black holes
- How to find invisible black holes
- Astronomers think they’ve just spotted an ‘invisible’ black hole for the first time
- OpenLearn: Black holes
- Clump Scout results:
- Radio Galaxy Zoo LOFAR results:
Acknowledgements
The SuperWASP project is currently funded and operated by Warwick University and Keele University, and was originally set up by Queen’s University Belfast, the Universities of Keele, St. Andrews and Leicester, the Open University, the Isaac Newton Group, the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, the South African Astronomical Observatory and by STFC.
The Zooniverse project on SuperWASP Variable Stars is led by Andrew Norton (The Open University) and builds on work he has done with his former postgraduate students Les Thomas, Stan Payne, Marcus Lohr, Paul Greer, and Heidi Thiemann, and current postgraduate student Adam McMaster.
The Zooniverse project on SuperWASP Variable Stars was developed with the help of the ASTERICS Horizon2020 project. ASTERICS is supported by the European Commission Framework Programme Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation action under grant agreement n.653477
VeSPA was designed and developed by Adam McMaster as part of his postgraduate work. This work is funded by STFC, DISCnet, and the Open University Space SRA. Server infrastructure was funded by the Open University Space SRA.
Radio Galaxy Zoo LOFAR and the Sixty Second Adventures in AI were supported by ESCAPE - The European Science Cluster of Astronomy & Particle Physics ESFRI Research Infrastructures, which in turn has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement no. 824064.