What a cool project… Galaxy Zoo leverages the human collective intelligence to help classify thousands of images taken from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey:
“Astronomers are inviting members of the public to help them make major new discoveries by taking part in a census of one million galaxies.”
It is the same concept introduced by Luis von Ahn et. al. (see the video on Human Computation) for labeling images, and used in Google Images Labeler.
After taking a short 15 images training, participants help classify photos of galaxies as Spiral, Elliptical or other — it is a fun project (and it is great for children) that teaches about Astronomy, while contributing to the very hard problem of image processing and classification… what better and more accurate way to classify images than using humans themselves, and the Web…
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