'Computers can only tell us so much'

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A team of astronomers and computer scientists at the University of Hertfordshire have taught a machine to "see" astronomical images. But Dr James Geach is astronomer at the University of Hertfordshire, who led on this research, said: "'Computers can only tell us so much." He discussed the issue with Dr Karen Masters, astronomer and senior lecturer at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at University of Portsmouth, who praised the value of crowd-sourcing in research. "The development of machine learning has been astonishing, but we'll always need humans to spot the weird stuff," said Dr Masters. In 2007, millions of photos were loaded onto the Galaxy Zoo website, which asked for volunteers to look through those photos and identify the different shapes of the galaxies so that scientists could learn more about them. In just 18 months some 150,000 volunteers had successfully classified 50 million galaxies, and the Zooniverse now has 1.4 million volunteers, added Dr Masters.