Topic: Plankton Portal Collaborates with Crowd-Sourcing
Author: "The above story is based on materials provided by University of Miami, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS."
Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130917090307.htm
Date of Article: September 17, 2013
Author: "The above story is based on materials provided by University of Miami, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS."
Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130917090307.htm
Date of Article: September 17, 2013
There are million images of plankton taken from In Situ Ichthyoplankton Imaging System (ISIIS), which is a one of a kind robot created by University of Miami and Charles Cousin at Bellamare LLC. The ones that funded it were NOAA and NSF. ISIIS as an ocean scanner has the features of showing the oceanic creatures' shadow, with a high digital quality, and the rate and vibration of a wave. So far ISIIS has been used in many places around the world in different oceans to detect different oceanic creatures. ISIIS is a great technology in terms of answering how plankton act, spread out, and how they survive in the ocean. “ISIIS gives us a new view on plankton, enabling us to see them in their natural setting, where they occur, what other organisms are nearby, even their orientation," explains Cowen.” Just as Cowen explains on how this technology gives us the abilities to understand and have more knowledge about them. The Plankton Portal data came from a project from Southern California Bight that took 3 days in Fall 2010. Jessica Luo a graduate student that is with the project says that it would take them longer than three years to analyze the data they discovered in three days. Cowen also agrees with Jessica, explaining that it is not possible for them to classify each image by hand. So they suggested that they look for different options for image analysis, and that is when they found crowd-sourcing to citizen scientists. Jessica Luo explains how a computer can identify different organisms but it can’t identify the difference of species as in family, order, generation, and etc of plankton, because that is something a human eye does best.
I chose this article, because I found it interesting and unique. This article gives knowledge about how technology ISIIS is useful to defining a plankton's home environment (ocean), interactions, movements, and more. The article also gives out the information of how crowd-sourcing was a great image analysis that gave them a lot of help to speed up the process of analyzing the plankton images, so that they can quickly discover the plankton creature as well as finishing their project. I found ISIIS the most interesting part in this article, because I learned how scientists use ISIIS technology to discover plankton's movement, environment, and how they interact in the ocean. I find it fascinating how the ISIIS robot can do all those awesome discoveries about the plankton. ISIIS and Crowd-Sourcing can have connections with not just discovering plankton but it can also be used to discover other oceanic species in other areas around the world.
The next step of this article could be that they have finished analyzing the images of the plankton by using Crowd-Sourcing. If they do finish analyzing the images, then they would have finished their project and display information of the new discoveries of the plankton. They would display some photos and information on the plankton specie such as their appearance, interaction, environment, and movement. Maybe they would also add some interesting, unique, and fun facts about the discoveries of the plankton specie. I think this article is important and significant because scientists are using technology as ISIIS and Crowd-Sourcing to determine plankton species information. Plus + with this technology there are many other species/creatures that we can discover with to find more facts and information.