Mazda Makes My Year by Calling Me a ‘Rebel’

I’ve been called a lot of things but ‘rebel’ hasn’t come up too often. Not that I mind. As part of a Mazda campaign, I’m being highlighted as one of four TED Fellows* who are ‘Mazda Rebels’. The other three are thoroughly impressive and I recommend you take a look. There’s an online vote where […]

A Daily Dose of Zooniverse

‘Something awesome from the Zooniverse every day’ was the tagline that we came up with, almost a year ago, for a new Zooniverse blog: Daily Zooniverse. Grant Miller had recently arrived to work at Zooniverse HQ in Oxford and I had a todo list of things I’d always wanted to try but hadn’t found the time […]

LSST, Public Data, and NAM Hack Day 2014

Today is the start of the UK National Meeting in Portsmouth. I’ll be there tomorrow, and running the NAM Hack Day on Wednesday with Arfon Smith – which is going to be awesome. Today at NAM, the nation’s astronomers will discuss the case for UK involvement in the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope project – the LSST. The […]

Crowdsourcing the First World War: A Lovely Social Machine

Working at the Zooniverse means that I get to indulge many of my interests beyond astronomy, like history. In January we launched a project in partnership with the Imperial War Museum and the National Archives called Operation War Diary. It’s a ‘citizen history’ site that asks the public to tag and transcribe more than one million war diaries, and other handwritten notes, produced on the […]

New Milky Way Project Paper Brilliantly Fuses Citizen Science and Machine Learning

A new Milky Way Project paper was published to the arXiv last week. The paper presents Brut, an algorithm trained to identify bubbles in infrared images of the Galaxy. Brut uses the catalogue of bubbles identified by more 35,000 citizen scientists from the original Milky Way Project. These bubbles are used as a training set to allow […]

Ideas Worth Spreading: My TED 2014 Experience

TED 2014 has just ended here in Vancouver and I have finally now experienced an event I’ve heard a lot about for many years. I’ve watched TED talks online for as long as I’ve watched anything online and the real deal did not disappoint. Attending TED for the first time has been intense, wonderful, and […]

The Zooniverse in 3mins 21s

This was recorded at the Citizen Cyberscience Summit in London in February – it’s me summarising the Zooniverse for anyone out there that might like to try out our own brand of Citizen Science.

Backstage at BBC Stargazing Live

This week is the BBC’s Stargazing Live show: three now-annual nights of live stargazing and astronomy chatter, live from Jodrell Bank. CBeebies are also getting in on the act this year, which I’m excited about. The Zooniverse are part of the show for the third year running and this time I have the pleasure of being here […]

A Brand New Milky Way Project

Just over three years the Zooniverse launched the Milky Way Project (MWP), my first citizen science project. I have been leading the development and science of the MWP ever since. 50,000 volunteers have taken part from all over the world, and they’ve helped us do real science, including creating astronomy’s largest catalogue of infrared bubbles – which […]

Zooniverse Jobs – Come Work with Us in Oxford

We’re expanding the Zooniverse team in Oxford and we’re looking for web developers. You need to be able to work in Oxford (which is a lovely place to work) and you need to want to change the way science is done! There are four positions we need to fill: Infrastructure Engineer Senior Front-End Developer Data Scientist/Hadoopist […]