This seminar is part of the Oxford Martin School Hilary Term seminar series: Blurring the lines: the changing dynamics between man and machine

Thanks to new technologies , citizen science has seen huge growth over the past decade, opening up important scientific research to the masses and harnessing the power of the crowd. Ranging from classifying new galaxies to monitoring wildlife in the Serengeti, the Zooniverse stable of citizen science projects led by Dr Chris Lintott has seen incredible success. But what does the future hold for citizen science – does it have the power to help in real life situations such as disaster zones? And what are the implications when dealing with huge amounts of potentially sensitive data in real time?

Speakers:

• Dr Chris Lintott, Director, Programme on Computational Cosmology, Oxford Martin School
• Dr Brooke Simmons, James Martin Fellow, Programme on Computational Cosmology, Oxford Martin School

About the speakers

Dr Chris Lintott is Co-Director of the Programme on Computational Cosmology, an Oxford Martin School Programme and an astronomer at the University of Oxford. His own research focuses on the formation and evolution of galaxies, and he leads Zooniverse.org, the world's most successful collection of citizen science projects which engage more than 800,000 volunteers in classifying galaxies, discovering planets and exploring the Serengeti. An advocate for the public understanding of science, he is best known as co-presenter of the BBC's 'Sky at Night'.

Dr Brooke Simmons is a James Martin Fellow on the Programme of Computational Cosmology, an Oxford Martin School Programme and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford. She completed her PhD in 2012 on the growth and co-evolution of black holes and galaxies over 8 billion years of cosmic time. Her primary research focus is on the connection between the growth of supermassive black holes and their host galaxies. She makes extensive use of Hubble Space Telescope and Sloan Digital Sky Survey data. Brooke uses parametric methods such as GALFIT to analyse galaxy light profiles and separate galaxies from their central active galactic nuclei (AGN), and has created her own method to determine bolometric luminosities of obscured AGN. She is also a Galaxy Zoo scientist. Galaxy Zoo is a highly productive, highly cited project that mobilises the public to visually classify galaxies, using the rich data produced to study galaxy evolution.