Using the power of our global community, NASA has developed an interactive app called NeMO-Net.
It's used to characterize coral reef ecosystems around the world with unprecedented accuracy. Today
we're joined by ten-year-old citizen scientist Kellen Homan and NASA scientist, Dr. Ved Chirayath
to tell us more about this fun project. Thank you both for joining us today! Ved, so can you tell us
a little bit more about NeMO-Net? What is it? Sure so I invented a technology called Fluid Lensing at
NASA and it's the first technique we've had that can look beneath the ocean waves and map corals in
3D. So we've been traveling around the world using drones and this technique to map corals in 3D and
the really the biggest challenge we have with all of this data is how to classify it. How do we get
the basic number of how many corals there are? How they're doing as a function of changing ocean
temperatures? And that's where NeMO-Net comes in, so we built a video game that ties into our
super computer, and you can download it and play it on your iphone or iPad device. And what you're
doing in that game is looking at our data sets that we are getting from around the world with
these drones and helping learn about corals at the same time as coloring them and feeding data into
our super computer. Wow, this is such a cool idea to get people involved in this project. Kellen
I understand that you've been working on this project so can you tell us is NeMO-Net more
like a game or is it like school work and have you learned science by playing the game? It's kind of
it's kind of like a game because it's not school work you kind of get to do what you want to do. You
can choose where you want to be and what you want to do they're like 2D 3D and then there's
stuff like that. That sounds very fun. What kind of things have you learned from playing the game?
There's a lot of different types of coral and there are some key regions that have coral.
They are.. you can classify Guam, The Great Barrier Reef, American Samoa, Hawaii, or Puerto
Rico coral. So that seems like where the most of the coral is probably. Wow I didn't know that so
can you show us kind of how you how you interact with this app? I hear that you are so good at
classifying coral that you have earned the status of sea turtle. Was it hard to get to that level?
Yep, I've been playing it for yeah a few months now, so I have my 3D
map of coral. I have the types of coral on here I can hold this and then I can go to a list
of all the coral types I have, what i can classify, and like what they look like. So then
I'll get out of that, and then we have the 3D map to you can like scroll all the directions you can
look from like all directions. It sounds like you're a pro! So Ved, how are citizen scientists
like Kellen and their work in this app helping us understand what's what's going on with coral reefs?
I mean to put it bluntly they are changing the world and we have mapped as of 2020 around six
percent of the ocean floor and one of the reasons why it's so difficult to map the ocean floor first
is because it's difficult to see anything beneath ocean waves, so our instrument helps fix that and
reveal that environment in 3D. But the second is once you have all that data it really doesn't
mean anything unless you have humans come in and help annotate what it is we're looking at is it
sand are we looking at sea cucumbers, sea grass, corals and it really becomes a complicated machine
learning problem. So when we first created the project, we didn't have a video game in mind we
were purely focused on super computing and being able to develop the tool to classify these reefs
but we learned you know that the supercomputer results and the machine learning outputs were
only as good as the training data we have. At that point, you know we thought all right we haven't we
have an untapped potential across the world in our nation as well with all of these students
who are interested engaged they want to explore these environments. It's funny that this
happened during the pandemic and a lot of folks were looking for an activity to do at home that
would be at once educational and benefit science, and that's when we we decided to launch NeMO-Net
on Earth day this year, and so we've we currently have around 100,000+ active users. Kellen is
in our in our top 1%t of pro players. He outclassifies PHD trained coral reef biologists
regularly. His name is admiral crocodile and it's it's really just amazing how quickly kids
in his age group pick up on classifying. This is not an easy task, I mean I struggle with this
you open the game you see a 3D coral which looks to you know like a loaf of bread to some people
it can look like very different shapes. Kids have to learn what that is, pass an accuracy test while
painting in 3D and that's how they graduate and level up the food chain in the video game
and all of that data then gets compared on a supercomputer we can measure it statistics
related to other scientists inputs other amateur players and it's really that
the sweet spot we found for classification is roughly Kellen's age group and the amount of
time that they play. The knowledge they have in these environments is really just extraordinary so
yeah I'd say we could not do it without without kids like Kellen. This is so amazing. So Kellen
do you have any advice for for people watching that might want to get involved?
Yeah I also wanna where I actually have the number.
There have been 700,300 no 73,588
classifications by everybody who's been playing NeMO-Net. That's amazing and advice is definitely
take your time and like do it one at a time and definitely look and make sure you know what each
choral type looks like because they do give actual pictures in the game of what the coral types
look like so that's that helps classify when you can see what the coral type looks like
and then you can put that in to your knowledge of what so what we're looking for in the game.
This is so cool I am just so impressed, but thank you both so much for joining us!