Pune Knowledge Cluster Launches Interactive Web Platform To Encourage Citizen’s Participation In Scientific Data Analysis
Pune, 3rd February 2022: The Pune Knowledge Cluster (PKC) has been established by the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India.
PKC aims to bring together academia, R&D institutions and the industry of Pune, to address the challenging problems of the region through innovative means, using scientific knowledge. One such challenging scientific problem is the analysis of big data.
Often scientific research faces hurdle like enormous data size, instrumental and computational limitations while seeking scientific interpretations from large datasets. PKC attempts to solve this by involving enthusiastic volunteers from the public to help with data analysis. PKC, through its flagship Citizen Science Program, has launched an interactive online platform where citizens can analyze galaxy images. With the help of archived lectures and training sessions, citizens from any background, without prior knowledge can help in analyzing such images by answering simple questions on the galaxy images.
This galaxy project is developed by astronomer Prof. Sudhanshu Barway from IIA, Bangalore and PKC’s Principal Investigator Prof. Ajit Kembhavi, who is also a renowned senior astrophysicist himself.
Prof. Kembhavi describes this program as “PKC’s Citizen Science program will enable citizens to contribute to cutting edge astronomy and help create a valuable database. In the process, they will be exposed to scientific methods.”
Describing the organization and its ongoing efforts, PKC’s Chief Operating Officer Dr. Priya Nagaraj added, ”PKC wishes to encourage public participation in scientific research. We believe this program will be instrumental in making science done in laboratories more accessible to the larger community. We have begun with astronomy, but intend to implement this program for several other types of scientific data going forward.”
With such contributions, researchers will be able to develop and improve the accuracy of AI algorithms which can eventually be used to analyze such data.
Galaxy project is hosted currently on: http://csa.pkc.org.in/
For signing up, visit: http://csa.pkc.org.in/signup/
Training sessions can be found on the website here: http://csa.pkc.org.in/resources/ and on
PKC’s YouTube playlist here: https://bit.ly/3kPaIur
