[This is an expanded version of a post I wrote for the Galaxy Zoo blog.]

Some colleagues and I successfully proposed for a symposium on citizen science at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Jose, CA in February 2015. (The AAAS is the world’s largest scientific society and is the publisher of the Science journal.) Our session will be titled “Citizen Science from the Zooniverse: Cutting-Edge Research with 1 Million Scientists.” It refers to the more than one million volunteers participating in a variety of citizen science projects. This milestone was reached in February, and the Guardian and other news outlets reported on it.

“Citizen science” (CS) involves public participation and engagement in scientific research in a way that educates the participants, makes the research more democratic, and makes it possible to perform tasks that a small number of researchers could not accomplish alone. (See my recent post on new developments in citizen science.)

The Zooniverse began with Galaxy Zoo, which recently celebrated its seventh anniversary, and which turned out to be incredibly popular. (I’ve been heavily involved in Galaxy Zoo since 2008.) Galaxy Zoo participants produced numerous visual classifications of hundreds of thousands of galaxies, yielding excellent datasets for statistical analyses and for identifying rare objects. Its success led to the development of a variety of CS projects coordinated by the Zooniverse in a diverse range of fields. For example, they include: Snapshot Serengeti, where people classify different animals caught in millions of camera trap images; Cell Slider, where they classify images of cancerous and ordinary cells and contribute to cancer research; Old Weather, where participants transcribe weather data from log books of Arctic exploration and research ships at sea between 1850 and 1950, thus contributing to climate model projections; and Whale FM, where they categorize the recorded sounds made by killer and pilot whales. And of course, in addition to Galaxy Zoo, there are numerous astronomy-related projects, such as Disk Detective, Planet Hunters, the Milky Way Project, and Space Warps.

We haven’t confirmed the speakers for our AAAS session yet, but we plan to have six speakers from the US and UK who will introduce and present results from the Zooniverse, Galaxy Zoo, Snapshot Serengeti, Old Weather, Cell Slider, and Space Warps. I’m sure it will be exciting and we’re all looking forward to it! I’m also looking forward to the meeting of the Citizen Science Association, which will be a “pre-conference” preceding the AAAS meeting.