Alan Deidun, resident academic at the Department of Geosciences and coordinator of the Spot the Alien Fish and the Spot the Jellyfish citizen science campaigns, was invited by the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the EU Commission to chair a session within a related expert workshop.

The workshop in question was organised at the JRC premises on November 20 and 21 and was a collaborative effort between a project (IAS-EU proof of concept) run by the JRC and the approved COST Action CSI Alien.

The main aim of the workshop was the optimisation of the JRC’s smartphone app an Invasive Alien Species (IAS), which tracks the occurrence of a number of invasive alien species listed in EU Regulation 1143/2014, by seeking the opinion of experts already involved in the running of citizen science smartphone apps. The JCR IAS app, as well as the Spot the Alien Fish and Spot the Jellyfish smartphone apps, are all available for both Android and iPhone platforms.

Deidun chaired a session showcasing the strong points of the two citizen science campaigns he coordinates and which are both funded by the International Ocean Institute (IOI), as well as giving an overview of the contribution that Artificial Intelligence (AI) can make to validation of citizen science reports, mainly through image analyses. Adam Gauci, also stationed at the Department of Geosciences, is responsible for integrating the AI aspects into the two citizen science campaigns in question.

 Ongoing research is in fact investigating the potential of mainstreaming automated species identification for submitted jellyfish sighting reports affected through image analyses, following preliminary encouraging results on the robustness of the system.