Zooniverse × Experiment

Sep 1, 2025 · 1 min read
projects

A collaboration with the Zooniverse community on AI-assisted annotation tools for citizen science.

Experiment is a platform for sharing AI-powered annotation tools with the Zooniverse community, built by Conor Klamann, Mike Walmsley, and myself, with initial funding from the University of Toronto’s Data Science Institute.

The idea is to let AI models assist volunteers in their annotations — for example, a brush tool where models suggest regions to mark on galaxy images, and volunteers can accept or correct those suggestions. The platform currently hosts projects involving galaxies from the Euclid space telescope.

My contribution focused on developing an interactive brush-based tool for generating segmentation masks.

See also the Zooniverse blog announcement and the Experiment platform.

Citizen Science Machine Learning Galaxy Zoo Zooniverse
Matthieu Le Lain
Authors
Matthieu Le Lain
AI for astronomy & astrophysics
PhD student at IRISA, Université Bretagne Sud (expected 2026), and lecturer in computer science, working on foundation models for astronomy and astrophysics, with a broader interest in deep learning applied to scientific data. Also contributing to the UniverseTBD collaboration on vision–language models for astronomy.