Meeting Abstract

P1.212  Saturday, Jan. 4 15:30  The wisdom of the expert crowd: a crowd-sourcing task for character discovery from nematocyst ultrastructur DALY, M*; REFT, AJ; LAW, E; O’LEARY, M; Ohio State University; University of Heidelberg; Harvard University; Stony Brook University daly.66@osu.edu

Innovations in both DNA-sequencing technology and computational methods have catalyzed progress in assessing the structure of the Tree of Life. The availability of detailed phylogenies has infused ecology, physiology, and other fields with comparative perspective. In contrast to the explosive growth in methods for generating and analyzing DNA data, studying phenotypes has remained complex and slow. Thus, the phenotypes of e.g., physiology, anatomy, and behavior that scientists often want to study or interpret with these trees are much less accessible and much more difficult to evaluate that the DNA-sequence data used to build the tree. In response to a US National Science Foundation challenge to improve the speed at which we “Assemble, Visualize, and Analyze the Tree of Life,” we are working to adapt methods of computer vision, machine learning, crowd-sourcing, and natural language processing to increase the ease with which phenotypes can be translated into characters for analysis and exploration in a phylogenetic context. Here we report on one component of this project, engaging academic scientists to collaboratively discover characters from nematocysts ultrastructure on a crowd-sourcing platform called Curio.