PIT Colloquium Series IV: Citizen Science, Public Interest Technology and Artificial Intelligence

Catalzying, strengthening and studying pathways of informal STEM engagement and learning in the United States by Darlene Cavalier
Darlene Cavalier is a professor of practice at Arizona State University's School for the Future of Innovation in Society and a Senior Global Futures Scientist, Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory at ASU. Professor Cavalier is the founder of SciStarter (a popular citizen science portal and research platform connecting millions of people to real science they can do), founder of Science Cheerleaders (a non profit organization comprised of current and former NFL, NBA and college cheerleaders pursuing STEM careers), cofounder of ECAST: Expert and Citizen Assessment of Science and Technology and cofounder of ScienceNearMe.org. She is a founding board member of the Citizen Science Association, an advisor and Fellow at National Geographic, a member of the EPA's National Advisory Council for Environmental Policy and Technology, appointed to the National Academy of Sciences "Designing Citizen Science to Support Science Learning" committee and named cochair of America 250's Innovation, Science, and Entrepreneurism Advisory Council.
Web3 and BioToken: How the Tokenisation of Nature is Helping Save Life on Earth with Andrew Robinson
Scientists around the world are working hard to come up with models to account for - and put financial values on - biodiversity. But there are many challenges. Biodiversity is complex and ever-changing. There are issues of data integrity, auditability, greenwashing, a lack of consensus on methodology and more. However a new suite of technologies, distributed and employing Web3 tokenomics, is beginning to bring together a financially-incentivised, community-powered and incorruptible solution that's grounded in the scientific method. The results are positive and forcing many people to completely rethink existing approaches to community science and nature conservation. Andrew is co-founder of EarthGuardians.LIFE, a fund which invests in innovative, big impact technology that connects people to nature to save life on Earth. He has spent most his life developing collective AI systems that recognise and reward people for knowledge that's often overlooked or undervalued - such as ecological expertise. He is perhaps best known as founder of the world's first nature conservation gaming app, QuestaGame (QuestaGame.com), which is played in over 50 countries and has generated a global map of species cited in over 700 scientific papers.
Advancing science productivity with citizen science and artificial intelligence with Luigi Ceccaroni
Over the past decade, there has been huge growth in the capabilities and applications of AI in citizen science. These applications can take an unsupervised machine-learning approach, in which data do not have to be annotated accurately by people first, or, more often, a supervised machine-learning approach, in which data labelled by humans are needed to train the AI algorithms. At present, citizen-science systems using AI are advancing science through a variety of mechanisms, namely: increasing the speed and scale of data processing; increasing projects’ temporal and geographical scope; improving the quality of data collected and processed; supporting learning between humans and machines; leveraging new data sources; and diversifying engagement opportunities.
Luigi Ceccaroni manages strategic research at Earthwatch [earthwatch.org.uk] and is a co-founder of 1000001 Labs [1000001labs.org]. Luigi obtained a BSc degree in Environmental Sciences from the University of Bologna (Ravenna, Italy), with a thesis on paleoclimatic change in Antarctica; an MSc degree in Information-Technology Languages and Systems from BarcelonaTech (UPC) [upc.edu]; a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from UPC, with a thesis on ontologies and environmental decision-support systems; and an Executive MBA from EAE Business School. His main research interests combine citizen science, ontologies, recommendation systems, semantics, personalisation, and artificial-intelligence application to environmental sciences. His activities include leading international initiatives on citizen-science data and metadata standardisation and interoperability.
Environmental ethics and fairness issues in the design of AI algorithms for biodiversity with Alexis Joly.
Algorithmic biases in AI models are known to pose fairness issues in terms of gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation or disability. However, this type of bias can also pose problems of environmental ethics. As an illustration, a plant identification model may be biased towards the recognition of some of the most common and useful species to humans at the expense of less common but equally important species for biodiversity. In this presentation, we will detail and analyse the biases that arise in the context of the Pl@ntNet platform as well as the solutions we are implementing to mitigate their impact.