cITe TAKES STUDENTS TO NEW HEIGHTS

Recognizing the importance of data in all professions, cITe helps students reach their peak potential with an interdisciplinary curriculum that also provides opportunities to work on technical solutions for the common good.

By Zachary Petit

The cicadas just kept coming.

This summer, red-eyed stowaways perpetually popped up in pant legs, homes, cars, businesses. The 17-year Brood X cicadas had exploded onto the scene, and their presence was allencompassing. But nowhere was that more apparent than at the Mount, specifically within the Center for IT Engagement (cITe) Scholars program. And perhaps no one was more energized by the frenzy than Gene Kritsky, Ph.D., the man dubbed “The Indiana Jones of Cicadas.”

Kritsky, dean of Behavioral and Natural Sciences, attributes the nickname in part to his days as a Fulbright Scholar in Egypt when he was locked in a tomb— but the rest is pure passion for all things periodical cicadas (after all, he first came to Cincinnati in 1983 for three reasons: trilobite fossils, Major League Baseball, and, yes, the indigenous insects).

With the historic brood emerging, Kritsky and cITe had decided to launch a Cicada Safari—quite literally. The team developed an app and mobilized an army of camera-phone-toting everyday citizen scientists to help document and research the emergence.

And while many in Cincinnati had perhaps underestimated the sheer volume of cicadas that would ascend upon the city, the cITe team had perhaps underestimated the sheer volume of people who would embrace the app.

Yes, the cicadas just kept coming— and so, too, did the photos of them. Thousands and thousands and thousands, offering a groundbreaking look at the Great Eastern Brood like never before.

BLENDING TECH WITH ANY DEGREE

The Mount launched the cITe Scholars program in fall 2020 with 12 students— all from a kaleidoscopic array of core interests and backgrounds. It’s a wholly unique offering that blends a student’s core area of interest with a dual major in Computer Science and Natural Language Processing.

Jacqueline Roberts ’17, program director of technology design development and user experience, says cITe empowers students to utilize data within their unique fields.

“They’re not giving up their interest in business or biology or psychology,” Roberts says. “It’s more about pairing that content area with technology, because really no matter what field you go into today, you’re going to be dealing with data and trying to understand it to some degree. It’s essential no matter where you go. So we really wanted to give them a technological toolkit that they could take into their field.”

Jacqueline Roberts ’17, Alex Nakonechnyi, Gene Kritsky, Ph.D., Rebecca Allen, Brooke Batch.

Photo by Mark Byron.

So far, those fields include everything from biomedical science to social work, communications, business, psychology, and even art. With a focus on Natural Language Processing—which Roberts describes as a systematic means of analyzing qualitative data, such as using technology to break down a large volume of feedback in, say, reviews of a product to quickly identify the overall themes and responses—the program gives participants a unique, competitive advantage upon graduation.

“Obviously, your market value increases,” says Alex Nakonechnyi, associate provost for campus technology.

Nakonechnyi believes that to make good tech, sure, coding is important— but a huge piece of the overall puzzle is usability. So he wanted to launch cITe to highlight the fact that to make good tech solutions, you need more than just excellent coders.

“We decided, let’s create a track for people who are not technical to get enough technical background in such a way that they can use technology to really revolutionize the world through what we refer to as the content area of their field,” Nakonechnyi says. “Cicada Safari is a real manifestation of that.”

CICADA SAFARI

Cicada Safari App.

Using crowdsourcing to study cicadas dates back to the 1840s, when a man named Gideon B. Smith put out a call in newspaper columns requesting cicada location intel from readers. By the time he died, Kritsky says, Smith had documented every known brood at the time.

Kritsky followed in his footsteps. In 1987, he began with a cicada hotline, which was featured on the front page of The Cincinnati Enquirer. “Next thing you know, I’m getting calls—so many calls the first day, my answering machine broke.” By 2004, when Brood X next emerged, tech advances saw him receiving an email every minute during the working hours of the first day. Then the iPhone came out—and with it, the dawn of apps.

cITe had produced the popular app for students, Mount Roar. So as he looked ahead to Brood X’s 2021 emergence, Kritsky began collaborating. When the resulting Cicada Safari App debuted, it offered a streamlined, well-crafted user experience, and a way for anyone to channel their inner cicada mania: Bug hunters could snap a photo of a specimen with their location services on, in order to capture the insect’s GPS coordinates. The image would land at cITe, where it would be verified by a trained team, and it would go on to help build a burgeoning body of data, piece by piece.

Prior to Brood X, the team pilot-tested the app during the small emergence of Brood VIII in 2019. It worked, yielding 5,721 records. Brood IX followed in 2020, and with it, video capability in the app, for a total of nearly 9,000 records.

Then Brood X emerged and when it did, more users downloaded the app. En masse.

The cicadas just kept coming, as did the photos, and eventually, the servers.

“It was more than I ever anticipated,” Roberts says. “I think I’ve seen enough cicadas for my lifetime. More than I ever anticipated seeing in my lifetime.”

Nakonechnyi says the team felt that if they hit 50,000 submissions, it would be an amazing result. All told, the team received more than 575,000 photos and videos, and the app was downloaded over 197,000 times. It included a leaderboard, and one user alone sent in more than 11,000 photos.

Meanwhile, up to 25 people at a time combed through the photos to verify them. One particularly adept champion, Chad Montag ’11, reviewed more than 87,000.

“There were a few days where we were getting like 6,000 photo submissions a minute,” Roberts recalls. “That was a little hair-raising, trying to make server space as it was being taken up.”

So the team scaled up. Sixteen CPUs became 64 tethered together.

Outside the Mount, people took notice. Science Magazine featured the app. MIT Technology Review covered it. Kritsky was interviewed by Russia’s Channel One. Media high and low took notice. Even Jimmy Kimmel talked about Kritsky in an opening monologue on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” making reference to the fact that Kritsky has said cicadas taste a bit like cold, canned asparagus. (For the curious, Kritsky says he didn’t partake in any taste testings this year—“…and that’s because, well, periodical cicadas got me tenure. And, job security—I want to have them be around. And so [if you eat a] typical female, you’re going to take 500 eggs out of the environment.”)

Students and staff reviewing app photos. Photo by Mark Byron.

Even wilder than the mountain of data that the team collected, Kritsky says, is the fact that they’ve already reviewed all the images.

The app is already yielding crucial insights. It’s helping them understand a couple of trends—the most important being the impact of land use and habitat destruction on cicadas, and Brood X in particular. For example, whereas in 1885 Brood X occurred in every single county in Indiana, now the results are spotty in the northern half of the state. As far back as the 1890s, Kritsky says, the USDA was worried about this very development. The app also captured the phenomenon of cicadas emerging off cycle. All told, “I’m now trying to map a half a million dots,” Kritsky says. Ultimately, the data will help yield the most accurate map that has ever been created for such an emergence.

INITIATIVES FOR CHANGE

cITe students.

Photo by Mark Byron.

Cicada Safari App’s lessons don’t stop with the app’s eponymous entomological phenom. Rather, Kritsky says some of the tech used in the app has been applied to others, “like spinoffs from the space program.” Moreover, he adds that Cicada Safari App was also powerful PR and visibility for the University, not only helping to recruit an amazing freshman class, but also helping to make the Mount extremely attractive and competitive in state grants.

Speaking of grants—cITe itself is bolstered by the Ohio Department of Higher Education’s Choose Ohio First program.

“The Mount’s Choose Ohio First cITe scholarship can award up to $8,000 per year for students who are Ohio residents, which really makes a big difference for students financially,” says Brook Batch, creative project and research coordinator of technology design development and user experience.

cITe has also earned a grant from the Ohio Department of Higher Education, designed to combat infant mortality, which helped the development of an app to help do just that in Southwest Ohio.

Batch says cITe began working with a group of nurse midwives from Dayton and ultimately designed a resource navigation app featuring a chatbot that provides educational content for new and expectant mothers. It utilizes Natural Language Processing to get to the root of what the user is seeking help with, and provides specific results, in turn, on everything from housing to transportation to health insurance.

“It provides all of those resources in a centralized location,” Batch says. “It makes a big difference, especially for individuals with low health literacy. It presents all the information in a way that’s easy to use and to understand.”

All told, the team says new partnerships and grants are in the works, and they’re perpetually looking for ways to use tech to help tackle more issues and explore new ground.

Asked whether he’s surprised that the program has produced such a crop of outstanding apps in such a short period of time, Nakonechnyi demurs.

“I don’t want to use the term surprised because it doesn’t just happen, so to speak,” he says. “There was a lot of work. But I think it’s a true testament to the overall culture of the Mount— because the Mount is a rather dynamic institution that is able and willing to do that kind of stuff.” cITe exemplifies the Mount’s dedication to interdisciplinary liberal arts and excellence in academic endeavors by helping students take their core interests to new heights with a dual major that offers technical solutions professionally and for the common good.

And the good news is, we won’t have to wait 17 years to see all the amazing creations that the program has to offer.