CHS: Small: Data-Driven Retention in Crowdsourced Image Analysis and Mapping

Northeastern University, Boston MA

Investigators

Abstract

This research aims to improve individual participation, retention, and repeat engagement in citizen science image analysis. Improving engagement in citizen science may accelerate the pace of problem solving and discovery by allowing contributions from a larger group of people, broaden participation, and allow new pathways for involvement for communities who may not otherwise have had them. This project seeks to serve and build smaller regional non-profit organizations that are vital to regional resilience by connecting participants with organizations proposing projects and encouraging participant re-engagement and collaboration. It will develop and deploy an open-source web platform and toolkit for creating engaging citizen science projects. The motivating application is disaster response, which has the potential for broader impact as disasters are increasing in frequency and severity. However, the general approaches can be applied more broadly in the citizen science, crowdsourcing, human computation, and human-computer-interaction communities. This project has three main research aims. First, it will develop techniques to automatically improve the onboarding process of online citizen science projects. This will help to understand the impact of early tasks on longer-term engagement in such projects. Second, it aims to develop a model of participant disengagement that can be used to guide interventions that dynamically adjust to individual participants. These interventions will be examined in the context of multiple tasks types, limited participant history, and relevant diversions within the workflow. Third, while most crowdsourced citizen science projects are driven by formal academic researchers and large-scale organizations, a goal of this project is to build a research platform where small to medium scale community based organizations can set the research agenda and explore the different questions and aims they pursue. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.