 Using the power of our global community, NASA has developed an interactive app called NEMOnet. It's used to characterize coral reef ecosystems around the world with unprecedented accuracy. Today, we're joined by 10-year-old citizen scientist, Kellen Holman, and NASA scientist, Dr. Ved Triath, 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 NEMOnet? 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 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 NEMOnet comes in. So we built a video game that ties into our supercomputer 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 supercomputer. Wow, this is such a cool idea to get people involved in this project. Kellen, I understand that you've been working with on this project, so can you tell us, is NEMOnet more like a game or is it like schoolwork, and have you learned science by playing the game? It's kind of like a game because it's not schoolwork. 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. You can classify one, the Great Barrier Reef, American Samoa, Hawaii, or Puerto Rico coral. That seems like where most of the coral is probably. Wow, I didn't know that. Can you show us 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? Yup, I've been playing it for 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 what they look like. Then I'll get out of that, and then we have the 3D map to scroll all the directions. You can look from all directions. It sounds like you're a pro. So, Ved, how are citizen scientists like Kellan and their work in this app helping us understand what's going on with coral reefs? To put it bluntly, they are changing the world. We have mapped as of 2020 around 6% of the ocean floor. 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. Our instrument helps fix that and reveal that environment in 3D. 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? It really becomes a complicated machine learning problem. When we first created the project, we didn't have a video game in mind. We were purely focused on supercomputing and being able to develop the tool to classify these reefs. But we learned that the supercomputer results and machine learning outputs were only as good as the training data we have. At that point, we thought, alright, we have an untapped potential across the world in our nation as well. With all of these students who are interested and 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 decided to launch NemoNet on Earth Day this year. And so we currently have around 100,000 plus active users. Kellan is in our top 1% of pro players. He outclassifies PhD-trained coral reef biologists regularly. His screen name is Admiral Crocodile. And it's really just amazing how quickly kids in his age group pick up on classifying. This is not an easy task. I struggle with this. You open the game, you see a 3D coral which looks 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 our supercomputer. We can measure its statistics related to other scientists, inputs, other amateur players. And it's really the sweet spot we found for classification is roughly Kellan'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 would say we could not do it without kids like Kellan. This is so amazing. So Kellan, do you have any advice for people watching that might want to get involved? Yeah, I also want to, where I actually have the number, there's been 7,000, 700,000, 300, no, 73,588 classifications by everybody who's been playing EmoNet. That's amazing. And advice is definitely take your time and do it one at a time. And definitely look and make sure you know what each coral type looks like because they do give actual pictures in the game of what the coral types look like. So that helps classify when you can see what the coral type looks like and then you can put that into your knowledge of 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.