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UCL community invited to become SDGs citizen scientists
10 January 2022
Join hundreds of volunteers who are helping create an open-access tool to classify research by the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
The UCL Sustainable Development Goals Initiative (SDGI) is encouraging staff and students to contribute to an open-source project that is integrating different attempts to classify research according to the 17 SDGs.
Open SDG (OSDG) is recruiting volunteers from across the world to use their knowledge and disciplinary expertise to assess the relevance of a series of text excerpts to the SDGs.
The initiative is seeking contributors from diverse disciplinary, education and cultural backgrounds to join its growing community of almost 2,000 volunteers – preferably those with an interest in and/or knowledge of the SDGs.
The 17 SDGs are the core of the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Adopted by all Member States in 2015, they provide a framework for the world’s ongoing economic growth, while protecting the environment and addressing social inequalities.
The Goals cover topics ranging from ‘Decent Work and Economic Growth’ and ‘Good Health and Well-being’ to ‘Climate Action’ and ‘Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure’. The Goals are broken down into 169 individual Targets.
“There are many research areas whose relevance to SDGs is still poorly understood,” explained Gustė Statulevičiūtė, Data Team Product Lead at PPMI, a research and policy analysis centre that developed the tool in partnership with the UNDP SDG AI Lab and a growing community of researchers.
“The risk is that some disciplines may be incorrectly assigned to SDGs or left out altogether. The contributions of our citizen scientists will help to improve the accuracy of the tool by capturing their different perceptions.”
Volunteers initially undertake a 10- or 20-minute exercise in which they read and assign SDGs to 10 short texts. After that, they can select one of two types of labelling exercises, either SDG-specific or validating various SDGs for different texts. The data used by the platform are drawn from various UN reports and books.
“We used the tool last year to measure the extent of SDG-related teaching across UCL’s 11 faculties, by classifying the module descriptions in UCL’s online catalogue by SDG,” explains Simon Knowles, UCL Head of Coordination (SDGs). The results of this mapping are included in the UCL Sustainable Development Goals Report 2020-21, which was published in December 2021.
The project aims to collect the largest and most authoritative source of SDG-labelled text data. This will be used to create a scalable and accurate open-access machine-learning tool for classifying text by SDG. OSDG has already published its first quarterly release of OSDG Community Dataset (OSDG-CD) online, available for use by researchers.