Observing Dark Worlds: A crowdsourcing experiment for dark matter mapping
Abstract
We present the results and conclusions from the citizen science competition `Observing Dark Worlds', where we asked participants to calculate the positions of dark matter halos from 120 catalogues of simulated weak lensing galaxy data, using computational methods. In partnership with Kaggle (http://www.kaggle.com), 357 users participated in the competition which saw 2278 downloads of the data and 3358 submissions. We found that the best algorithms improved on the benchmark code, LENSTOOL by > 30% and could measure the positions of > 3x10^14MSun halos to less than 5'' and < 10^14MSun to within 1'. In this paper, we present a brief overview of the winning algorithms with links to available code. We also discuss the implications of the experiment for future citizen science competitions.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1311.0704,
title = {Observing Dark Worlds: A crowdsourcing experiment for dark matter mapping},
author = {David Harvey and Thomas D. Kitching and Joyce Noah-Vanhoucke and Ben Hamner and Tim Salimans},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1311.0704},
year = {2013}
}
Comments
25 Pages (Large spaced, equiv. 8 pages in MNRAS style), 7 Figures