An underwater mission with NASA.

Back in 2011, NASA sent a team of astronauts, scientists and technicians to the bottom of the sea to observe marine life, taking thousands of pictures in the process. We worked with them to build a tool that harnessed the power of the cloud and the crowd to analyse those images. Citizen scientists became players, analysing as many pictures as possible to get a higher rank. Real-time updating of score and rank gave the instant feedback users craved, which meant almost half of the images were categorised in the first 24 hours. This was one of our first ‘live’ applications and paved the way for future tools.