Galaxy Zoo is an online cosmology/astrophysics project by a team of cosmologists and other scientists in whichanyone can participate to help classify galaxies and other objects. The article in New Scientist points to Kate Land (a former PhD student of well known Joao Magueijo of Imperial College) from Oxford as one of the main involved in the project.
The idea is to use our natural machine learning skills to identify different kinds of galaxies and objects in photographs. Well, once we had not dominated machine learning at the high level we would like (although we are marching very fast in the direction), why not train the best learning machines that already exist. And as people do that voluntarily and for pleasure, probably they will do it very well. I have tried and passed in the initial trial. Two big advantages: you will see a lot of nice pictures of far regions of the universe and learn a lot in the way.
Nice project, guys.
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PS: there is a more detailed account of it in Cosmic Variance: Galaxy Zoo!
