"What we’re finding is that combining human and machine classification gives better results than either on their own – the machines do the bulk of the work, but you still get that human ability to be surprised and to deal with the unexpected. We need to work with our robot colleagues, not see them as competition!"

“I was a big meteor spotting fan, at school, what I really liked to do was meteor counts. So I would lie in the back garden in December for the Geminids or something with a tape recorder and a piece of string, and when a meteor went past I would call out the time on to the tape and hold a piece of string up and measure the length of the meteor and then we’d write all this down and send it off. It was a way of doing science with nothing except eyes, and so I was hooked at that idea that I could do something in the back garden with really simple equipment that could make a contribution to science. If you look at what I do now, where I spend my day job running websites like Galaxy Zoo that get the public involved in doing science with nothing more than a web browser it’s almost full circle, we’ve gone from being in the back garden with a deck chair and piece of string to a web browser but the principle is still the same.”