Galaxy Zoo Human + AI Paper Published

Hi all, Mike here.

A few months back, I introduced our new AI that can work together with volunteers to classify galaxies. It’s able to understand which galaxies, if classified by you, would best help it to learn. You and the AI have together classified tens of thousands of galaxies since we launched the new system in May.

I’m really happy to say that our paper was recently accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society!

We’ve made a few changes since the early version I shared before. I think the most interesting change is a new section applying AI fairness tools. These tools are usually used to check if AI models make biased decisions – for example, offering less jobs to women. We used these tools to check if our model is biased against galaxies with certain physical properties (it isn’t).

You can read the latest pre-print of the paper for free here. The (essentially identical) final publication will be also available for free from Monthly Notices once published – we’ll update this post when that happens.

Happy classifying,

Mike