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Moedal and the Zooniverse: Harnessing Citizen Science for New Physics Searches

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Moedal and the Zooniverse: Harnessing Citizen Science for New Physics Searches Twitter: @twhyntie MoEDAL and the Zooniverse: Harnessing Citizen Science for new physics searches T. Whyntie a,b a Langton Star Centre, b Queen Mary University of London MoEDAL Software Meeting Wednesday 18th March 2015 Overview • The Zooniverse: - Example: The Milky Way Project. • Panoptes – Zooniverse for all. • Zooniverse and MoEDAL: - Suggested plan for NTD scans; - Using the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (wLCG). • Questions for the Collaboration. T. Whyntie (Langton Star Centre) #MoEDAL Software Meeting 2 The Zooniverse • World-leading Citizen Science: - https://www.zooniverse.org/ - “Real Science Online” • Led by Prof. Chris Lintott (Uni. Oxford, BBC Sky At Night). • 1,301,214 users as of 13:49 GMT Wednesday 18th March 2015. • Started in astrophysics, now covers many disciplines (including particle CC BY-SA 3.0: Image credit physics – see Higgs Hunters). • Powered by Amazon Web Services. T. Whyntie (Langton Star Centre) #MoEDAL Software Meeting 3 An example: The Milky Way Project • Finding dust bubbles in IR data from the Spitzer Space Telescope: http://www.milkywayproject.org • Draw circles on the images to indicate presence, size and shape of bubbles. • Also look for green EGOs. • And anything else that’s odd – the real power of Citizen Science! • Images classified multiple times by many users. T. Whyntie (Langton Star Centre) #MoEDAL Software Meeting 4 T. Whyntie (Langton Star Centre) #MoEDAL Software Meeting 5 Panoptes – Zooniverse for All • The Zooniverse team are developing a tool to allow anyone to assemble their own Citizen Science projects: Panoptes - Panoptes (API): https://github.com/zooniverse/Panoptes - Front End: https://github.com/zooniverse/Panoptes-Front-End/ • Requirements for setting up a project: - Subject sets – images to be classified by the Zooniverse Users (ZUs); - Workflow – series of questions and tasks to be performed by ZUs resulting in a “classification” for each subject; - Science case and background material to provide context. T. Whyntie (Langton Star Centre) #MoEDAL Software Meeting 6 Suggested plan for NTD scans? • As discussed at the last collaboration meeting, there is clearly potential for a Zooniverse project with the Nuclear Track Detector stack scans. Panoptes provides the tools to do this. • What we’d need: - Images suitable for upload to the Zooniverse servers (AWS); - Image metadata to allow post-classification analysis; - Questions and tasks for the workflow – what do we want to find? T. Whyntie (Langton Star Centre) #MoEDAL Software Meeting 7 Using the grid • Scanned images are huge: - Raw images can be uploaded to the grid and shared anyone in the Collaboration with a grid certificate. • Images will need processing before upload. - Use the grid to “shard” the data – split images into manageable chunks, attaching the metadata required to reassemble when performing analyses. - These can then be transferred to the (private) Zooniverse AWS servers ready for analysis by Zooniverse Users. • Analysis can be done using the Panoptes API. T. Whyntie (Langton Star Centre) #MoEDAL Software Meeting 8 Questions • What datasets are/will be available? Timescales? • What are the raw images specifications? - Format, size, etc. • Designing the workflow: - What shapes would we like people to draw on the scans? - Do we need to look at multiple images for patterns/links? - What “odd” things are we looking for? • Shall we create the moedal.org Virtual Organisation? T. Whyntie (Langton Star Centre) #MoEDAL Software Meeting 9.
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