Citizen COmputing for Pulsar Searches: CICLOPS

TL;DR

CICLOPS is a citizen science project that gamifies pulsar searches, leveraging human pattern recognition alongside distributed computing to improve candidate identification in radio astronomy data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel gamified platform combining citizen science with distributed computing for pulsar candidate selection.

Findings

Engages volunteers in pulsar candidate identification.

Combines human pattern recognition with computational power.

Creates an entertaining platform for scientific discovery.

Abstract

Most periodicity search algorithms used in pulsar astronomy today are highly efficient and take advantage of multiple CPUs or GPUs. The bottlenecks are usually represented by the operations that require an informed choice from an expert eye. A typical case is the presence of radio-frequency interferences in the data, that often mimic the periodic signals of pulsars, and require visual inspection of hundreds or thousands of pulsar "candidates" satisfying a number of preselected criteria. CICLOPS is a citizen science project designed to transform the search for pulsars into an entertaining 3D video game. We build a distributed computing platform, running calculations with the user's CPUs and GPUs and using the unique human abilities in pattern recognition to find the best candidate pulsations.