The Field Museum in Chicago had a problem: its zoological, geological, botanical, and other scientific collections contained somewhere in the order of 40 million objects, many of which were not cataloged. The botanical plant collection alone contained more than 3.5 million samples and had the potential to contribute to understanding global climate change, according to Matt Von Konrat, head of the collection. But without digitization and analysis, the collection remained underused in research that could help science and society.
Roosevelt University in Chicago also had a problem. Many of her brilliant students of mathematics were eager to gain real-world experiences that could introduce them to technology tools and prepare them for careers in the industry. But most of the students had jobs or family responsibilities, which made pursuing apprenticeship opportunities and challenging travel, according to Melanie Pivarski, a mathematics professor at the university.
In an attempt to solve his problem, Von Konrat called Pivarski to ask if her “brains” of statistics and modeling of internal mathematics, as he referred to the students, could help. Pivarski considered the possibility of helping him can also help solve her problem and said yes.
College and university leaders often mention the benefits of undergraduate research programs — and for good reason. Many of these leaders say that students in such programs gain real-life experience in data collection, technology tools, research methods and analysis, while also developing mentoring relationships, changing their perspective on failure and developing transferable skills. Others note that undergraduate researchers acquire communication, problem-solving, project management, budgeting and proposal writing skills. These points are valid but often do not mention beneficiaries beyond the students.
A new study on the collaboration of Von Konrat and Pivarski published in June in Research Ideas and Results highlights that scientists can also benefit from undergraduate research. The data sets generated by the students who brought their membership were reliable and very helpful for the museum researchers.
“We will never be able to perform as much as individual researchers,” Von Konrat said of the help his team has received from undergraduate students and other members of the community. “This has allowed us to greatly accelerate our entire process of documentation and discovery.”
“Even if the students were doing our science interactions on the computer,” Pivarski said of the collaboration, “it was really clear [to them] this is real data, it comes from a real place, and it will help move science forward. ”
Here’s the background: using today’s technology tools, Von Konrat did a quick job of capturing digitized images of the museum’s liverwort samples. The liver is a small, compact plant, like a moss that grows in warm, wet regions of the world. These are descendants of the first plants that made the transition from water to land 100 million years ago, according to Von Konrat. Because they are tiny — about the size of their eyes — they are ecologically sensitive and, as a result, help inform scientists about climate change.
But Von Konrat’s efforts have resulted in tens of thousands of images. (If he had continued, he might have had hundreds of thousands of images.) However, image analysis would have taken much more time and effort. The massive number of images had created congestion. Heartless, he set up a kiosk at the Field Museum to get help from those who attended the museum.
“I didn’t think people would be excited about liverworts,” Von Konrat said, acknowledging that their name “isn’t the most attractive.” “But people really want to contribute to science.”
A visitor to the museum kiosk would see an image of a botanical sample on a screen and be asked to measure it. Each image was shown to multiple visitors, which resulted in many measurements. For example, a single liverwort image may have 80 different measurements from 80 different guests. Von Konrat understood that guests will have different levels of success in understanding — or even following — the directions of measurement. This meant that some, though not all, of the measurements would be accurate. He needed to understand how to eliminate inaccurate measurements from his data set.
He turned to Pivarski. Can she and mathematics, actuarial science, data analytics and undergraduate students in computer science in her Industrial Mathematics Applications class filter out the wrong entries from her? its crowdsourced data set? Field Museum researchers will only be able to use the data set in their research if it is of high quality. Pivarski met the challenge, especially during the isolation of the pandemic.
“Everyone was on Zoom, and … weirdly, we really got together,” Pivarski said. “We wanted to bring it to a state that could be published and not just a state of the art of first-degree research, which is what had happened in previous years.” Pivarski did not immediately know how to answer Von Konrat’s question, which seemed to motivate her students.
“There’s a certain essence in their work,” when the teacher doesn’t know the answer from the beginning, she said. “It’s a nice thing you can’t really get into a Calc I class.”
Pivarski students wrote their own programs in Powershell (a task automation and configuration management program), Python (a programming language), and Excel (a spreadsheet) to screen and clean up the data. Their automated process included multiple phases of outliers removal, as Von Konrat wanted. In the end, they determined that 40 percent of the crowdsourced data had to be discarded. This meant that 60 percent of the data was valid — and usable.
“You can imagine this is 60 percent less that we should do,” Von Konrat said. “We’re actually able to use it for our research.”
The students, Pivarski reported, not only contributed to authentic research, but thought deeply about the natural world and career opportunities.
“It’s one thing when they search on Google for the name of an online plant,” Pivarski said. “Be like,‘ Well, this looks very different from these [images of actual samples provided by the researchers of the Field Museum]. ’“ Their very beginning realization that plants appear as different varieties in the world natural was palpable.
“They were also very curious about how the samples were collected and the excitement of international travel to get biological samples,” Pivarski said.
In regular Zoom calls with researchers, they asked questions about the work and life of scientists.
“It’s really an experience to be in an internship without having to do all their summer for an internship or travel,” Pivarski said of the opportunity the course provided students with work and family schedules. do not usually accommodate those experiences. “It simply came to our notice then. Anyone can do that. ”
