BeeWatch

BeeWatch is a citizen science project developed in collaboration with the Bumblebee Conservation Trust (BBCT) and the University of Aberdeen. Citizens submit photographs of bumbelbees, then have the opportunity to identify the species (and this is a hard task) using an online key. BeeWatch deploys a range of AI technologies, both for automating the provision of informative and motivating contextual feedback to recorders through Natural Language Generation, and for combining independent species identifications by different users using novel Bayesian methods for verifying records. BeeWatch builds on pedagogical research on the role of formative feedback in motivation and learning; in particular, about expectations of the learner from feedback and devices such as parallel empathy. (Funded by RCUK)

Partners

• BBCT
• University of Aberdeen

Advaith Siddharthan

Jane Whild

Sharma, N., Colucci-Gray, L., Siddharthan, A., Comont, R. and Wal, R. (2019) Designing online species identification tools for biological recording: the impact on data quality and citizen science learning, PeerJ, 6:e5965, pp. 24 pages

Sharma, N., Sam, G., Colucci-Gray, L., Siddharthan, A. and Wal, R. (2019) From Citizen Science to Citizen Action: Analysing the potential of a digital platform to create new environmental subjectivities, Journal of Science Communication, 18, pp. 1-35, SISSA Medialab

Wibowo, A., Siddharthan, A., Anderson, H., Robinson, A., Sharma, N., Bostock, H., Salisbury, A., Comont, R. and Wal., R. (2017) Bumblebee Friendly Planting Recommendations with Citizen Science Data, Workshop: Workshop on Recommender Systems for Citizens at ACM RecSys, Como, Italy