Catchathon 2021: Full report!

Thank you ALL for joining us in the Catchathon 2021! 😊 We had a blast!! Did you?! :)

Jump to:

• Overall stats
• Final hour
• The Winners
• Participant impressions
• How did GAIA 🤖 do?
• Team leaderboards
• Catcher leaderboards

Here's an amazing video from Gulliver Prep - one of our participant schools - about their experience (see more participant impressions and photos below):

Here's the overall (pretty impressive!) stats:

Duration: 24 hours
Total number of catchers: 363
Total number of teams: 41

Total number of movies analyzed: 97002
Total research movies: 47634
That adds up to 62 days of lab time!!!

We were analyzing an average of 67.3 movies per minute!

Final hour

If you missed our live Final hour stream on Facebook, with some of our participant teams and a Q&A, you can catch up here:

Final hour stats:
90 catchers playing
15119 total movies
6677 research movies - 6.7 days of lab time in just one hour!

The Winners

The winning team was "Tracker" - a one-man team by our supercatcher starider - with 12716 research movies & 16605616 points ! :) CONGRATULATIONS! 🎉

Runners up were "I See Stalls" with 6071 research movies & 7708764 points. In the third place by points we had team "krissi" with 3697823 points, and "Raider Team" by research movies with 4621 movies!

Our special catcher GAIA 🤖 of the "Bots" team took fourth place in points (3628976) and third in research movies (3223)!

Among human catchers, the top 5 included: starider, caprarom, christiane, sean4046 and KarisFraMauro by points, and starider, caprarom, christiane, sean4046 and lscatcher by research movies!

(see the full team leaderboard and catcher leaderboard below)

What did our participants say about the catchathon?

Well, most were sad it was over! :)

Here's some feedback from Gulliver Prep middle school:

These two days that our seventh graders participated in the Stall Catchers activity were full of positive energy. Students were empowered  by knowing that, at this early age, they could assist actual research  for an actual cause.

Dr. Isabel Lopez, Middle School Science Faculty & Department Chair, Gulliver Prep

Zion Lutheran School:

This amazing program has so captured &  engaged my students. They spend so much of their own time on the  program. I had one of my track athletes in our after school team study  hall - stand up and dance when he hit a million points & was proudly  showing his results to teammates as they came in for practice.

Diane Hinck, Zion Lutheran School

Palmer Trinity School:

Thank you for organizing this event. Our students really enjoyed it and  were very competitive the last few days. In fact, some students  continued outside of class!

Robert Moore, Science Department Co-Chair, Palmer Trinity School

How did the world's first citizen science bot do?!

Well, our bot GAIA 🤖 actually got a little nervous in the beginning of the event and froze... But not for long! Soon enough, she was running and catching slowly, but steadily!

GAIA is an intelligent bot that uses deep learning to classify blood vessels as either flowing or stalled. Since she is the first citizen science agent on the Stall Catchers platform, she's the Gateway for Artificially Intelligent Agents. She also shares her name with a Greek primordial deity - the great mother of all creation. GAIA is a trinity of machine learning models that makes decisions based on a majority vote.

GAIA 🤖 eventually came in fourth by points and third by real movies. There was a very close race between her and our catcher caprarom (who, by the way, jokingly refered to our GAIA 🤖 as "that pesky bot", since she was annoyingly on his heals for most of the catchathon! 🤭). AND, in the end, another one of our supercatchers - christiane - actually got ahead of GAIA 🤖 by points! :) It was a very close race though: 3697823 vs 3628976 points.

So it's 1 for supercatchers, 0 for GAIA 🤖, eh? 😜 Just kidding - we're all in this together, GAIA 🤖 included, and hopefully she will help us analyze data faster in the future!

We will be conducting full analysis of how well we did working together with GAIA 🤖, and whether the crowd answers we got were as good as humans-only. Check back on this blog to find out the answer to that!

Last but not least... Here's the full team and catcher leaderboards (by research movies)!

Team leaderboard:

Catcher leaderboard:

Thank you again for joining us, everyone, and see you in the future events! 💜