How society ought to engage with nature, science and technology

Kevin: Good afternoon everyone, it’s a real pleasure to see you here. I’m Kevin Shakesheff, PVC for Research and Innovation. One of the best parts of my job is to introduce these celebratory events where we get to mark a really important landmark in someone’s career. Today we are here for Advaith. I am really looking forward to his presentation. A few housekeeping things before I say a few things about Advaith. So we're going to have the lecture and then we'll have a question and answer session. We're expecting a really big crowd online, so if you're online and you'd like to ask a question there's an email address that's been provided. In fact, it's on the screen now, and you can also put your question into the chat function on YouTube. Helene will let us know your questions later on. If you're on social media, please do share the presentation and we've got the hashtags on the screen there (#OUtalks @OpenUniversity) if you're on Twitter or X.

So it’s a huge pleasure to introduce Advaith. Advaith is a Professor of Computer Science and Society. He is in our Knowledge Media Institute in the STEM faculty and he's been with us since 2017. I was hearing before, he was way up north at the University of Aberdeen. His research is at the intersect of citizen science, artificial intelligence and data science. He develops socially responsible technologies that bridge the divide between professional scientists and the public. As I'm sure we'll hear, he's been part of really successful and interesting citizen science projects. So on that note, I’m really looking forward to the presentation, and I'll invite Advaith to come up and give his inaugural.

Advaith: Thank you Kevin for your kind introduction and welcome everyone. Thank you for being here too, I'm looking around, especially those of you who don't know me and are here just out of curiosity, but also those of you that do know me and are here regardless. I've chosen a somewhat provocative title to this talk - How society ought to engage with nature, science and technology. Whether or not I tell you, I was certainly hoping it will get you thinking about it in advance. So my research, as Kevin hinted, is around designing technologies that help the public engage with nature through some form of science learning. In this talk I'm going to try and talk about my research in the context of how knowledge gets constructed, and by whom it gets constructed.

So where do I begin? Around 300BC Eratosthenes is Chief Librarian in the library in Alexandria and he's the first person to calculate the circumference of the Earth. His exact calculations are lost to us but a commonly told story goes roughly as follows. He read on one of the scrolls in his library that “On the day of the summer solstice at noon, in the city of Syene, the sun does not cast shadows.” Then, of course, on the next summer solstice he went out in Alexandria and the sun was casting a shadow and I tried to mock this up here. At Syene at the bottom the sun’s rays are perpendicular. In Alexandria, which was around 5000 stadia away, he could calculate the angle of the sun by the relative length of the shadow to a stick. If you follow those angles around that's the angular distance between Alexandria and Syene. Knowing the distance between Alexandria and Syene he just multiplied that so the angle was 1/50 of the circumference, and then he multiplied the two and he got to 250,000 stadia which, surprisingly, was within 2% of the right answer. So I think I started with this example because in my mind it is a prototypical way we do science. We read something, we go out and observe things in nature, when we can't reconcile them we do something clever, and some new knowledge comes out. But hang on a second, to calculate the circumference of the Earth you need to subscribe to a worldview where the Earth is round. Actually the Greeks had established that a couple of 100 years before so this was the established world view at that time. So you could see the moon was round, you could see the phases of the moon. During a lunar eclipse you could see the shadow of the Earth following the moon. But also on an everyday basis you could see ships go over the horizon and re-emerge from the horizon. You don't even need ships. Have you ever laid down on a beach and looked at the sunset and thought it would be nice to see that again. But if you stand up, you can actually see all of it again. The Earth is curved. You need to be around 1.8 meters tall, but that's all. So the flat earth believers is a much more recent thing in Europe. They came into prominence in the 19th century, but a bit like today's climate deniers they were not entirely informed by observing nature outdoors, so that's something I'll leave there.

Another interesting thing about the story is that there was a library in Alexandria in 300 BC. Actually we've been creating knowledge ever since we learned to write. So the clay tablet I show here is from 1800 BCE, but the oldest ones that we have access to are from 3300 BCE. I picked this particular one because what's written on the tablets are the Pythagorean triples, so integers a, b, and c such that a² + b² = c².

So by the time the library in Alexandria burned down, it burned down twice, Julius Caesar kind of half burnt it down, and then it burned down completely around 300 AD. By that time the Chinese had already mastered papermaking, around the first century BC. They held on to this technology, they protected it fiercely for a good six centuries, before they lost the battle to the newly emerging Islamic Caliphate to the west, and Samarkand required the technology to make paper, and they became the centre of the papermaking world for a while. The technology moved through the Islamic world and it arrived in Europe around the ninth century, and by the 11th century, the Moors were putting up paper mills in Spain. So I bring this up because once you had books made of paper, you didn't need to go to the big library anymore. It was possible to read and write at home. So this was part of a process where people could gain access to knowledge by reading. But to do that you had to be able to read this because we hadn't invented the inter-word spacing and that made reading really, really hard. So a few Irish monks in the eighth century had started putting spaces between words. This was mirrored in the rest of the world. So in the North of India, they moved from the Brahmi script to the Devanagari script, which demarcated words with lines. But it was only by the 13th century that inter-word spacing had become standard in Europe. That meant we could think about more and more people reading more and more books and the invention of the mechanical press by Gothenburg in the 17th century sped this up. It was only at that point that Europe actually started producing as many books as China did. So by the 18th century there was discussion about universal literacy and a few northern European countries managed to achieve universal literacy, not universal education. So the churches decreed you had to be literate, and therefore you learnt at home. But it meant that the process moved on and by the late 19th century there were Acts in parliament in the UK that brought about universal education for children. If we think about democratising higher education, that's more recent still. It perhaps goes back to the founding of our Open University in 1969, with the mission to be open to people, places, methods and ideas. An idea which was described by a politician at the time as “blithering nonsense”.

In those early years the OU, as you know, I put this particular logo up there to remind me, the OU made extensive use of the television to get its learning across and that was the knowledge media of the time. The knowledge media that was going to corrupt us all but the knowledge media of the time. Coincidentally, I came across that story of Eratosthenes on television too in Carl Sagan’s series Cosmos. I see a few people nodding there. Nowadays the OU still co-produces these amazing science documentaries with the BBC, but we've moved our teaching onto the internet, which is the knowledge media of our time. Of course, when we get to the knowledge media of the future the OU will be there as well.

My second example is from the year 1715. So Edmund Halley is Royal Astronomer in Great Britain, and there's about to be a total eclipse of the sun that passes roughly east to west over England. He wanted to record the times of the beginning and end of this eclipse across quite a broad spatial width. To do this, he came up with a methodology that nowadays we call citizen science. In his words the method is with a request to the curious to observe what they could. In addition to the data, even in this early paper, you can see that one of his motivations was to try and engage the public around this grand event. So the novelty of the thing being likely to excite a general curiosity.

It's a fantastic paper to read, I highly recommend it, because he names and shames the citizens. So this is how it's meant to look, the Reverend Mr William Derham from Upminster. He records when the eclipse starts, when the moon touches the greater spot, the middle spot, the third spot, when total darkness begins, all the way to the end. But of course our Professors of Astronomy at both universities were not so fortunate. So “My worthy colleague, Dr John Keill by reason of clouds, so nothing distinctly at Oxford but the end. That's unfortunate. “The Reverend Mr Roger Cotes at Cambridge had the misfortune to be oppressed by too much company, so that though the heavens were very favourable, yet he missed both the time of the beginning of the eclipse and that of total darkness.” So we still encounter data gaps with citizen science.

But it should be no surprise that citizen science was part of the OU’s thinking from its inception. So when you run a distance learning programme it's a way to engage students with things like outdoor field observations. It's quite a nice method. This paper from 1972, so around three years after we were founded. We basically shipped off a bunch of these air pollution monitoring kits to our students and asked them to record at a particular time on a particular day. We got them all back in and we put them on spreadsheets, in those days sheets that you spread over a table, and that's an amazing piece of work. Like previous work, one of the motivations for this is again this engagement with the public. So “the measurement of pollution levels is one way of demonstrating some of the interactions of science in society.” I think this is an interesting theme here.

So with the advent of the internet it's been possible to scale these projects up. Our iSpot Nature is the iconic OU citizen science project now, where 80,000 users from around the world submit photos of wildlife and help each other in identifying these to species level. So we have recorded 43,000 biological species from 180 countries on this platform.

So nowadays I'm the academic lead of iSpot Nature, but when it was founded around 15 years ago, as Kevin mentioned, I was starting my first academic job as a Lecturer in Computer Science up in Aberdeen, around 500 miles north of here. I was working in a very niche discipline at the time, it was called natural language generation. We were trying to get machines to communicate with us through language. I know it's a silly idea. But I was in conversations with a colleague in ecology, Professor Rene van der Wal. He’s watching from Sweden. So hi, Rene. I was wondering if there was a way of communicating ecological data through these technologies. A couple of news stories caught my eye at the time. So this was the first one. It was about the reintroduction of the Red Kites in Great Britain. So these birds were ubiquitous in medieval times. Shakespeare referred to London as a city of Kites and Crows. Like Crows, Kites are scavenging animals, so they cleaned up after us, they were the garbage collectors of the time. But then as corporations started collecting the garbage for us, we stopped needing their services, so we killed them all, slowly over 400 years, we could have stopped at any time, but we didn't. This made me wonder in what kind of worldview is it okay to kill off an entire species of wild animals, not because of any particular threat to you, but because their services are not needed anymore? So in what kind of worldview is nature an ecosystem service?

It turns out there's been a lot written about this. I don't have time to go through all of it, but there is this idea that in certain worldviews, culture is distinct from nature, the human realm of culture is separate from the natural world. This is pretty much the starting point of anthropology. Our culture distinguishes us from the animals and we study culture, but it shows up in all kinds of ways. One of the reasons for this distinction arising is probably to do with property ownership. So if land is something you buy and sell, then that commodifies the nature that exists on the land, but you see hints of this in urban planning. So cities are spaces where you try and keep nature out. You also see reflections of this in early feminist writings in Georgian and Victorian times. So women who felt excluded from the realm of culture found themselves identifying more with nature and feeling more connected with nature. So Mary Wollstonecraft hinted that our treatment of nature and our hierarchies in society are part of a wider pattern of patriarchal oppression, for example. I remember growing up in India that I always felt a bit uncomfortable with these nature documentaries, because to me they were a little bit voyeuristic with us on the outside looking in. The message from physicists resonated with me much more deeply, the idea that we're all made of stardust and we are just specs in the universe. I very much prefer that kind of worldview. I ended up doing physics as an undergraduate degree, by the way, and I even got a first. But then I learned that in physics problems are either trivial, which means they've been solved, or non-trivial which means I'm not going to solve them. So I needed to move to a discipline that moved faster and I moved to computer science. Why computer science? I think there's a story there as well which I won't tell but the writings of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke did make it a cool area to go in.

So we wondered whether it was possible to engage the public with this reintroduction effort with the Red Kites and whether we can reconnect with Kites by learning more about their lives. So we went and talked to the people at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds who were running this reintroduction effort. Actually, it wasn't very clear even to them how these birds are recolonising the landscape at that point in time, but they had a few of these birds tagged with solar-powered satellite tags which recorded their location, not very often with solar power on a tiny bird in Scotland. In summer you could get five or six fixes a day and in winter you were lucky to get one a day. So the RSPB didn't think there was much value in this small data in a world of big data. But when we looked at it, there was actually a lot of information there. So the black crosses here are fixes where the bird has been moving in a relatively straight line at a relatively high speed. You can think of this as travelling movements, whether exploring or going somewhere. The orange fixes are where they're going in a kind of zigzag pattern at a lower speed. You can interpret these as foraging behaviours where they are just looking around. When you cluster the orange crosses we are clustering 90% of the points. You get these grey polygons, and you can think of these as home ranges, so areas where there is sufficient food that the bird can stay a while. So when we looked at a week’s data of the Kite, which is the interval at which the Kite was sending these things back to us to conserve data, we could see three broad movement patterns. Either they were staying within the home range and just foraging, or it was moving from one home range to another one, or it was doing a long loop and coming back to where it started.

This is the basis of telling some stories. So we augmented this with environmental data about the kind of terrain it was in, the weather conditions at the time, the knowledge we had of Red Kite behaviour. You could suddenly produce these blogs about the birds. I'll just read the first paragraph out. “Wyvis had enough of the area around Teavarran and decided to move to another home range around Crieff about 73 miles away. Wyvis is only one year old, but is already exploring the landscape to identify a good territory. Wyvis has been foraging in many different habitats this week and she roosted largely in woodlands around Errogie and Crieff. No doubt Wyvis had a social week as Kites Moray and Millie were seen in the vicinity often.”  I like this, it was an early example of what we call data storytelling. It's a nice example because the stories are not entirely factual. We don't actually know what the birds are doing. We don't know why they're doing them. But the RSPB were very happy for us to write engaging stories that are plausible given the science. So the idea is to inform and engage. They use these with, for example, school kids in the Black Isle. Many of these birds were named after local schools to try and build some connection with the birds, but of course, they didn't necessarily stay there. This got quite a lot of attention at the time. It was reported in the national press, the New Scientist ran an article on it, it won an EPSRC prize for telling tales of engagement. It was reported in the UKRI Impact Report on Digital Economy Research. I still think this kind of digital storytelling where you combine visuals with text and some creative elements with factual elements is a nice way to go. So one of my students Phillimon, who is here, is looking at creating these data storytellers from social economic data, as well as environmental data.

So the other story that caught our eye was about the decline in bumblebee populations. This is somewhat different to the Kites because we didn't actually try and kill them all. It just so happens that we exhibited behaviours which are not very helpful to them. So we also wanted to get people more engaged with what's happening at that level around this. So could we reconnect people with nature by just observing it a little bit better? I think what struck us with this is the fact that to the untrained eye all bumblebees may look the same. I confess I might have been one of those people who couldn't distinguish bumblebees at the time. So once you observe that there are actually 25 species of bumblebee in the UK, around nine that you can commonly see, then the world starts looking a little bit different and you can begin to think about the interactions between all these different elements, even in your own garden. So we worked with the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, that had just been set up because actually there was not a lot of knowledge about the distributions of bumblebee species at that time. The data we had was mostly from the ‘50s and ‘60s and not really accurate anymore. Of course, there's too many of them to count so a citizen science approach seemed a good one to take.

This is the first interface we constructed. So you submit some photos of a bumblebee you've taken and then there's a bunch of visual filters so you can tell it that it's got a black thorax and a black abdomen with a red tip, and it filters out the species that don't match. Finally, it gives you some hints on how to distinguish the ones that are left. We encouraged our participants to have a go, to have a guess and it didn't matter if they were wrong because we wanted to learn and the way we allowed them to learn is we had an expert identify the photo and get back to them. So we had a little computer programme that gave them some informative feedback. So “Thank you for your new submission. BeeWatch identified the bee as a Red-shanked carder bee rather than the Red-tailed bumblebee. We wouldn’t normally expect to see a Red-shanked carder bee in this area so this is an exciting record. They are difficult to tell apart, the female Red-tailed and the Red-shanked carder bees are distinguished by the colour of the hairs on their pollen baskets. The Red-tailed has black eyes and the Red-shanked has ginger-red hairs.” We ran a study where we let people identify batches of 10 photos, and one lot only got told the right answer and the other lot got feedback like this. We could see that by the 50^th photo, the ones receiving the feedback were performing 10% better than the ones without. We also noticed on the platform that the more feedback you gave participants, the more data they submitted. So citizen science platforms generally struggle to engage with participants around data.

We made all kinds of additions to this and I'll just run through a few of them. The data we collected was typically a bumblebee on a flower. So not only do we have records of the species of bumblebee, we also have records of the species of flower. This turned out to be a terrific way of engaging people with the data. So in this interface you can select a bumblebee and on the right you can see the most common flowers it's been spotted on. But you can also click on a flower and see the most common bumblebees that visit it. This gets you to reflect on the fact that, for example, when you go to a garden centre and you see a pollinator-friendly label on a plant and you buy it, it is not entirely clear which pollinator it's friendly for. So there's lots of nuances here.

Having created this interaction dataset, we used it in many ways. So when people submitted a record, we hinted at what's a useful flower to have in the near future. So in the next month the plants favoured by common carders that are likely to be flowering are dead nettle, cosmos and fiddleneck. We also created a recommender system where you could tell it what plants you had in your garden, and then it produced a database to figure out what the likely species of bumblebee are that would feed on those flowers and recommend other flowers that would support those species through the rest of the year. Again, this gets you reflecting on the fact that different flowers bloom at different times and we're changing climates, things get a little bit out of sync sometimes. So if things flower too early there might be nothing when the bumblebees come out and stuff like that.

So eventually we had to incorporate Artificial Intelligence into these systems, but we didn't want to do it in a way that excludes people or undermines them. So we came up with this idea of a visual dialogue. So Artificial Intelligence is not actually that good at telling bumblebees apart. It's great at butterflies, but it performs at around 60% accuracy on bumblebees. So these are the top three predictions for that one and you can see where the problem is. It's clear to us that two of them are clearly not it. So the way this interface works is, if you really don't like what the AI is telling you, you can help it by selecting the features that you can spot. So if you tell it that it's got a black thorax and a red and black abdomen, it modifies its predictions. You can go back and forth and you might end up aligning your thinking with the computer’s or you might not. But in our system you get the final say, you don't have to take what the computer gives you. Each time you get some hints on how to distinguish the three likely ones.

When we asked people why they participate in BeeWatch the predominant reason they gave is to learn. So helping conservation and interest in nature comes next and very few people do this to make a scientific contribution or out of professional interest. Then you can ask what do you do with that learning? So we asked them whether participating had changed the way they manage their gardens. Around 2/3^rd of them said that it did. They said they were, for example, choosing plants that are bee-friendly, observing which plants the bees enjoy and planting more of those, more awareness about having pollinator-friendly plants for as much of the year as possible, leaving bits of the garden overgrown, creating different habitats, adjusting lawn mowing patterns, providing nesting areas. So the kinds of things you'd expect a conscientious gardener to move towards and that was nice to see. We also asked them whether they were happy with the changed appearance of their garden, and ¾ were. The reasons were ‘doing my bit for conservation’, seeing increases in wildlife and the impacts of what you do. Several pointed out that having more flowers is nice for humans as well as bumblebees. It makes the garden more alive. There's always something happening, something to watch. It's good for fruits and vegetables. It gives you some bragging rights talking to others. I liked the last one. It regenerates an interest in insects that almost all of us have as kids, and we lose along the way somewhere.

So at this point you've probably gathered that I like the idea of observing things outdoors in the natural world, and I like the idea of doing science that way. Yet in our school systems almost all science is taught indoors in classrooms and labs and it's not just that, it's that children today spend much less time in nature than their parents did. People talk about the nature deficit disorder and the consequences of spending less time in nature on mental health and physical health.

So at this point I was lucky to stumble into a collaboration with others who had been thinking in greater earnest about the school system than I had. So Dr Laura Colucci- Gray who's here in the audience, Dr Poppy Lakeman Fraser who's listening online and Dr Andrea Sforzi, who is a Natural History Museum Director in Tuscany. So there were some perspectives of this coming from the side of ecology from education and informal science learning, in addition to my perspective from technology. We started this collaboration called X-Polli:Nation. The idea was to make citizen science learning in schools fun, so get the kids outdoors and add some sensory elements to it so it's not about the data collection anymore, but it's about doing things. We had a cycle of citizen science practice in schools where you do some learning around pollinators and it's already in the curriculum so you do some learning online, but then you also use the tools we developed in BeeWatch to explore interactions between species and to learn to distinguish species. Then you actually go out into your school and you do some data gathering. Then, through another process, you figure out good places to plant habitat for pollinators and then you go home and you tell your parents what you did, and you tell your neighbours what you did, and then you spread the word. Then the next year you can see if there's any impact of the stuff you've planted. We tried to introduce artistic methods into this as well to also make it more engaging. So to sketch that orange-tip butterfly, the way you observe it is pretty much the same as the way you need to observe it to identify it as an orange-tip butterfly. But then when you actually draw it, it creates perhaps a more emotional connection to the butterfly than if you just record it as a data point in the database.

So we explored some ideas around engaging kids with this and then we got more curious about the sense of touch because this is the first sense we develop in the womb, it is how we start beginning to explore the world. But at some point we give up on it and we rely on more cerebral senses like vision. But touch is still a very effective method of engaging with nature. We wanted to get kids asking questions and conducting scientific inquiries around touch. For example, why are some tree barks rough, why are some tree barks smooth? If you wanted to do a scientific study in your school garden would you expect to see more moss growing on the rough bark or the smooth bark? Would you expect to see more bugs in the rough bark or smooth bark? What's the advantage of being rough? What's the advantage of being smooth? As part of this we designed a haptic stylus that allows you to feel textures on a computer screen. This means you can start engaging with touch around things that you might not have access to otherwise. So why do snakes have scales? Are they the same scales that fish have? and so on and so forth.

When we asked the kids why they enjoyed participating, surprise, they don't come up with learning as the first choice, but they did appreciate the fact that they were contributing to knowledge construction. They were not just absorbing knowledge, they were contributing towards it. They mentioned feeling empowered and listened to and the fact that we were using their data, and also co-creating these interfaces with them to make them more applicable in schools. They particularly liked the idea of translating what they learn into some civic action. This could just be planting in the school. So you’d see two kids with watering cans going around the school at lunch break while the rest of them are having a laugh. Then it's a different two kids the next day.

So thinking about epistemic justice and us at The Open University, I want to leave you with some thoughts. So we potentially have this amazing collective intelligence, 150,000 students and staff distributed around the country. So we could be constructing knowledge together. This could start with observations of the natural world, in the arts or in the sciences, but also, we could think about trying to address some of our global sustainability challenges together, gain some ideas around what the perceptions are, or what we could do, or what might work. We could design technologies that might help us bring all of this together. So I'd be curious to hear your thoughts about the future of learning at The Open University in the days and years to come. Thank you very much.

But before I finish, if I gave you the impression that I've done all this by myself I apologise. There's a long, long list of people and I didn't want to introduce them through it to break the flow. The ones in bold are people who've been co- investigators with me on grants. The ones in green are fantastic because they're students who've often done the early explorations around ideas. I should mention not all the students are mine either. The ones in purple are non-academic partners from Butterfly Conservation, the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, the Royal Horticultural Society, St Albans Church of England Primary School in Havant, Learning Through Landscapes, and the Bees, Wasps and Ants Recording Society. I should also acknowledge the kind folk who funded this research, UKRI, especially PSRC and NERC, and National Geographic, and the old version of UKRI, the Research Council’s UK Digital Economy Team. Of course I need to acknowledge The Open University and the Knowledge Media Institute who have done so much to support this work, including hosting these 15 year old software frameworks for us and keeping them up to date. Conserving software is as much of an issue as conserving wildlife populations and some image credits, and thank you for your time.

Kevin: Thank you for a fantastic inaugural. We've got a bit of time for some questions.

Speaker: Thanks Advaith for a really great talk, really interesting work. I'm just curious about your observations and experiences with engagement in citizen science through all of these platforms and this theme of justice that you brought up in terms of the inequalities of participation in citizen science and whether you had any observations on how to smooth those out? In many of your research projects I guess it’s dependent on people having access to open spaces or gardens of their own to engage. So I was curious as to whether you had any observations on how to reduce some of those inequalities in engagement with citizen science?

Advaith: It's a really tricky issue and I think this is one of the reasons we thought about taking it into schools. So we're working with state schools and church schools. Through the pandemic it became clear that inequities in access to nature and inequities with access to science learning, they really correlated with socio-economic inequalities. So we did think that schools shouldn't just be a car park and a football pitch, but there should be some equitable space where you can encounter nature and learn about it. So that was the quick fix, work with an organisation that is diverse and get everyone participating. Our citizen science platforms are very online. We don't have a very good idea of who our participants are, but given the number of them that garden, I think we can estimate this.

Speaker: Thanks Advaith, great talk. The world has a lot of challenges with conspiracy theories and fake news, climate change denial. Do you have a view as to how you can engage people with the realities with citizen science, the realities of the world to help challenge these false narratives? Is there a strategy there?

Advaith: I think I hinted at this when I suggested that not all worldviews follow from observing nature. I don't really know how to address that so there's clearly a political aspect to it. If you live in Texas you know the world is getting hotter. You feel it. I'd rather not go into how we try and persuade people who think that differently to us. Again, starting with schools is the only answer I can come up with. That's going to be my standard answer to everything now.

Kevin: Did you have any ideas yourself stimulated by that? It's a fascinating idea.

Speaker: I was thinking of climate change and getting people to observe nature, when the buds come out and butterflies appear and stuff like this and if you see it happening earlier and earlier maybe that suggests that it is getting warmer.

Kevin: There was a talk last year from one of our departments in art history that was looking at art of nature from centuries ago, and comparing it to today to give you that long time view of how things have changed. So that's quite an interesting overlap to that.

Helene: We have some very favourable comments on YouTube about Red Kites and requests for your paper and a couple of questions. But one that's come in before that on email related to Red Kites as well. What kind of urban infrastructure would be most efficient to preserve local flora and fauna areas? What would be the main goal for local city councils to implement changes to how technology can support nature’s cyclical processes? So two questions there really.

Advaith: So I guess the first question is what nature? So there is a bit of a pyramid and with respect to pollinating insects, I think the answers are fairly obvious and many councils are already clued in. You cut the grass less, you let it grow wild on the side of the road. You plant these wildflower meadows in parks. You stop using pesticides. You leave some areas overgrown. Since the pandemic when everything was left to grow, I see a lot of councils keeping that up. As we move along, if we talk about birds, by and large we do keep birds in mind, there's plenty of people putting feeders out. There is some interest in garden birds at least. Big raptors get less favourable press still. But at the same time it is true that the UK is still one of the most nature deprived countries in the world and it's not getting better. We're losing biodiversity at higher rates than most of the world. All we really have control over is the little patch of land that we tend.

Harith: Thanks Advaith. Great talk. Maybe my question is not too far from the previous one, but it's the other way around. Citizen science works on the premise that people will play nice, so you get some data and then you create knowledge. As you said, if you're working with kids, no problem, they're all very nice. But when you work with adults, then these kind of misuses become a bit more frequent. So what do you think? Do you think this is a risk that we need to worry about with citizen science projects, and what kind of moderation or prevention can we embed into the systems to make sure everyone plays nice?

Advaith: So the obvious risk with iSpot for example, is that some data is sensitive. So you don't want to tell people where falcons are nesting, or where particularly rare plants are. So there are systems to obscure data to make them harder to find. So that's one sort of risk. I think you're hinting at the risk of people submitting malicious data and this could happen on purpose or just because their phones have got their GPS wrong, which is a bigger issue, especially with older data. So there are systems in place for verifying this using models to determine how likely an observation is and if an observation is rare getting back to the participant to confirm that they did really see what they saw. I think we are not in a space yet that people are actively trying to infiltrate and destroy citizen science projects from the inside.

Harith: You will when you get to the climate change.

Helene: How did you identify and keep your adult participants engaged in your research? Do you find they need to be incentivised to take part?

Advaith: I think with BeeWatch it was about engaging with them with the data as well. That was it. It’s not a transaction where you submit a record and we say thank you, but we use the data to offer something back. I think that's what guided us on BeeWatch. iSpot is different. It's a social forum. Although everyone's online, they know each other for a long time. They have conversations and they keep each other motivated around the recording. But learning is a big, big thing here. To some extent people do these things to get better at species identification. You do that because it improves the way you experience nature, you can feel that. So if you go for a walk, and you actually know what's around you, or what's possibly around you, even if you don't see it, that improves the experience of the walk.

John: Hi Advaith, a great talk. So I was really intrigued about the relationship between citizen science and education as a motivator and the link and your call to arms to think about the OU as one big collective intelligence and on citizen science platforms. So if you think about or if you work in the education area, you know that if you want to make a change of any sort to significant you have to change assessment. I noticed that the pictures of the people using your systems are children but they're young children. So it looks to me like they're in an assessment free world, or an assessment free area of learning, which may be easier to interact. I was wondering if you'd had any thoughts about how we might have to change assessment in order to introduce citizen science and connect students to nature etc.

Advaith: Well you can still assess things. You can assess the knowledge that emerges from some such exercise. You can assess the effort put into observing the natural world, for example, or helping to curate the knowledge that comes from this. Or you could offer this up without assessment, with credits for participating in something bigger, which would be my preference. You should talk to Nick next to you, I'm sure he has a few ideas on this.

Helene: Thank you for this amazing talk. I'm curious about the concept of gamification, and if it could be used to promote citizen science?

Advaith: This has cropped up roughly every couple of years for the last 15 years. It crops up in the house as well, because learning in schools is gamified now. In general I'm opposed to it. I think learning should be for learnings sake, not to get rewards in. Well there is my answer to assessment.

Speaker: I'm with you on the gamification Advaith I think. My question is how important do you think, or to you personally, is the science in citizen science. So you started out with an example that was about knowledge being derived from observation, but way preceding what we regard as the modern era and the modern thinking about science, where the bumblebees, the observations are almost incidental, they're kind of tools and certainly in learning about science, they're sort of tools that support learning about a way of thinking and deduction. This is well-trodden ground in the theory of citizen science, isn't it? But so much of what we talk about is about observation. How important is the science? How important should the science be?

Advaith: That's an excellent question. I think when we started out with the bumblebee stuff, we started out in response to a lack of data. I remember going to my colleague Rene and asking him how many bumblebees were there? How many are there now? He said that no one had counted, we don’t know. We did start from there but we very soon realised that it doesn't really matter what the numbers are, we know that they're declining, and we need some positive actions to reverse that. So I think we pivoted quite early in the project into whether learning about the environment through this is more useful than the knowledge that comes out from the data. Having said that, the scientific work we did with the BeeWatch dataset was comparing our list of pollinator-friendly flowers, which mostly derives from recent records in people's gardens and reflects current gardening practice which differs from historic practice, with the records that the Royal Horticultural Society had. So we wrote a paper with them. Most of the plants in our lists overlapped, but there were a good 10% of our records that they were not aware of. This might be because the plants that we only now grow in the country because our gardens are a bit warmer. I think the message is that it's useful having these monitoring systems in place because data gets out of date quite fast in a changing environment. So that's the scientific value due to this.

Em Dean: This has been great. At the outset you mentioned the use of ‘ought’ is very daring. Where do you think the ‘ought’ of Computer Science such as AI ethics comes from?  What does technology itself tell us about what we should do with it, if anything?

Advaith: Do we know who this question is from?

Helene: It's from Em Dean in KMi actually.

Advaith: So the word ‘ought’ came out of a conversation I had a year ago with another OU colleague who is a moral philosopher, and he explained to me in detail when I should use ‘ought to’ and when I should use ‘should’. I took this on board and I went with ‘ought’ in this title. ‘You should tie your shoelaces’ but you wouldn't say ‘You ought to tie your shoelaces’. So there is this moral weight there. I don't want to go into AI and ethics, that's a topic for someone else's inaugural.

Kevin: We’re up to time. Thank you so much to the audience both here and online for contributing. We're going to have a bit of a celebration downstairs now so it just remains just to thank Advaith again for a fantastic presentation. Thank you very much.

[Video]

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