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Home / Proceedings / Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence / AAAI-21 Special Programs and Special Track

Intelligent Recommendations for Citizen Science

February 1, 2023

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Authors

Daniel Ben Zaken

Ben-Gurion University


Kobi Gal

Ben-Gurion University University of Edinburgh


Guy Shani

Ben-Gurion University


Avi Segal

Ben-Gurion University


Darlene Cavalier

Arizona State University


DOI:

10.1609/aaai.v35i17.17726


Abstract:

Citizen science refers to scientific research that is carried out by volunteers, often in collaboration with professional scientists. The spread of the internet has allowed volunteers to contribute to citizen science projects in dramatically new ways while creating scientific value and gaining pedagogical and social benefits. Given the sheer size of available projects, finding the right project, which best suits the user preferences and capabilities, has become a major challenge and is essential for keeping volunteers motivated and active contributors. We address this challenge by developing a system for personalizing project recommendations which was fully deployed in the wild. We adapted several recommendation algorithms to the citizen science domain from the literature based on memory-based and model-based collaborative filtering approaches. The algorithms were trained on historical data of users' interactions in the SciStarter platform - a leading citizen science site -as well as their contributions to different projects. The trained algorithms were evaluated in SciStarter and involved hundreds of users who were provided with personalized recommendations for new projects they had not contributed to before. The results show that using the new recommendation system led people to increased participation in new SciStarter projects when compared to groups that were recommended projects using non-personalized recommendation approaches, and compared to behavior before recommendations. In particular, the group of volunteers receiving recommendations created by an SVD algorithm (matrix factorization) exhibited the highest levels of contributions to new projects, when compared to the other cohorts. A follow-up survey conducted with the SciStarter community confirmed that users felt that the recommendations matched their personal interests and goals. Based on these results, our recommendation system is now fully integrated into the SciStarter portal, positively affecting hundreds of users each week, and leading to social and educational benefits.

Topics: AAAI

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HOW TO CITE:

Daniel Ben Zaken||Kobi Gal||Guy Shani||Avi Segal||Darlene Cavalier Intelligent Recommendations for Citizen Science Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (2021) 14693-14701.

Daniel Ben Zaken||Kobi Gal||Guy Shani||Avi Segal||Darlene Cavalier Intelligent Recommendations for Citizen Science AAAI 2021, 14693-14701.

Daniel Ben Zaken||Kobi Gal||Guy Shani||Avi Segal||Darlene Cavalier (2021). Intelligent Recommendations for Citizen Science. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 14693-14701.

Daniel Ben Zaken||Kobi Gal||Guy Shani||Avi Segal||Darlene Cavalier. Intelligent Recommendations for Citizen Science. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2021 p.14693-14701.

Daniel Ben Zaken||Kobi Gal||Guy Shani||Avi Segal||Darlene Cavalier. 2021. Intelligent Recommendations for Citizen Science. "Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence". 14693-14701.

Daniel Ben Zaken||Kobi Gal||Guy Shani||Avi Segal||Darlene Cavalier. (2021) "Intelligent Recommendations for Citizen Science", Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, p.14693-14701

Daniel Ben Zaken||Kobi Gal||Guy Shani||Avi Segal||Darlene Cavalier, "Intelligent Recommendations for Citizen Science", AAAI, p.14693-14701, 2021.

Daniel Ben Zaken||Kobi Gal||Guy Shani||Avi Segal||Darlene Cavalier. "Intelligent Recommendations for Citizen Science". Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2021, p.14693-14701.

Daniel Ben Zaken||Kobi Gal||Guy Shani||Avi Segal||Darlene Cavalier. "Intelligent Recommendations for Citizen Science". Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, (2021): 14693-14701.

Daniel Ben Zaken||Kobi Gal||Guy Shani||Avi Segal||Darlene Cavalier. Intelligent Recommendations for Citizen Science. AAAI[Internet]. 2021[cited 2023]; 14693-14701.


ISSN: 2374-3468


Published by AAAI Press, Palo Alto, California USA
Copyright 2022, Association for the Advancement of
Artificial Intelligence 1900 Embarcadero Road, Suite
101, Palo Alto, California 94303 All Rights Reserved

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