Muki Haklay is a professor of geographic information science and co-director of the newly formed research group Extreme Citizen Science (ExCiteS) at University College London
If you are interested in finding our more about ExCiteS, you can visit the project website, http://www.ucl.ac.uk/excites/.
Showing posts with label cyberscience. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cyberscience. Show all posts
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Simon Tokumine is talking about Vizzuality and the Old Weather project
Simon Tokumine works for Vizzuality, a company that specialises in developing citizen cyberscience projects. One of their most successful projects is Old Weather, where citizen cyberscientists get to help meteorologists make climate model projections by transcribing and interpreting old transcripts recovered worldwide from weather observations made by Royal Navy ships during the first World War.
More information at http://vizzuality.com/ and http://www.oldweather.org/
More information at http://vizzuality.com/ and http://www.oldweather.org/
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
The 'Digital Exposure of English Place Names' by Stuart Dunn
Crowdsourcing is often used to build up communities with a specific knowledge base. Stuart Dunn, a Lecturer at the Centre for e-Research in the Department of Digital Humanities at Kings College London, introduces a humanities project called 'Digital Exposure of English Place Names'. Stuart also informs us about a new scoping study, which hopes to provide some insights in developing a typology for crowdsourcing.
To find out more visit http://englishplacenames.
To find out more visit http://englishplacenames.
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Growing the ranks of citizen scientists - Scistarter, CERN@School
Yesterday afternoon at Citizen Cyberscience Summit, I found at how the grassroots movement is developing, and gained some insight into some of the resources and tools available.
We heard from Darlene Cavalier, who is an advocate for science literacy, and is encouraging citizen scientists enter discussions relating to scientific policy in the US. She also started up the website www.scistarter.com to help people with no hard academic background to participate in science at a recreational level.
Scistarter offers a place to go not only for citizen scientists, but also for those interested in setting up a Citizen Science project. You can find tools for developing data collection, sorting and visualisation, as well as ideas for building communities and designing a website. Scistarter has an impressive media partner - Discover magazine. Darlene is a senior advisor to the magazine. Adding you project to the scistarter Global project finder promises to connect you to our community of doers!
Demonstrating that you really don’t have to have in higher education to contribute to Citizen Science were A-level students, Louis Wilson and Chris Lundy (from Simon Langton Grammar School for Boys in Kent), who described a project that started from a school trip to CERN. CERN@School gives students an opportunity to use chips (named Medipix) from the Large Hadron Collider. Eleven schools in the Kent area are now using these chips to gather data about secondary cosmic rays in the atmosphere, and Queen Mary University’s GridPP project is helping them to process the data.
Chris and Louis are in the process of designing an app for smartphones (with smaller mega-chips e.g. USB stick in size) and are hoping to collaborate with application software developers at the Summit.
Friday, February 17, 2012
Science by citizens
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| Don't panic, organise by Martin_Duggan on Flickr |
Shannon Dosemagen and Sara Wylie from PLOTS are interested in open source development of tools for grassroots science. They want civic science to solve the problems of engaging the community in environmental science and health research. What matters to them is that citizens are interested in different kinds of needs and data types outside usual standards. So they are trying to develop science which is community orientated and owned.
Their first project used balloons and digital cameras in 2 litre soft drink bottles to do aerial mapping/photography. It was first used in Louisiana so that actual on the ground stakeholders could get involved in tracking and monitoring the oil spill form the Deep Water Horizon disaster. They now have over 200,000 images and have also transformed all of the data into to industry standard but also created non-online data e.g. maps that were handed out at diners and shops. It has now been used for pollution monitoring at the Gowarnus Canal superfund site in Brooklyn NY as well as by protestors in Jerusalem, Wall Street and Santiago to show the extent of their movements.
Not everything is so urban though Alasdair Davies from Zoological Society of London presented the Instant Wild application. They have 6 camera traps in 4 locations like Sri Lanka, and Kenya. When they are activated by a mammal moving past them the photo is sent to a volunteers phone so they can identify what animal it was they are now upto 80,000 downloads to iPhones and over 325,00 identifications. They have had some real surprises like a fishing cat in Sri Lanka or leopards in Kenya but the most important one was a mountain mouse deer which has only been photographed once before in 3 years (before that it wasn't even officially recognised as existing). They hope to move forward with 21 new cameras and new locations as well as supporting the Android platform.
The last project was EveryAware presnted by Vittorio Loreto from La Sapienza University of Rome. It is a platform that integrates objective and subjective monitoring to improve awareness and possibly change behaviour. They combine various technologies from sensor boxes to smart phones with their flagship project being "Widenoise". Measureing actual noise (objective) and a user's prediction (subjective) it helps build up a noise map of the area but also engage the user in what the noise levels are around them
These are only 3 of the projects trying to bring people to bear on science and engage them actively in thinking about their local environment as well as the global.
Developing skills for Citizen Science: Tom Igoe
The first day of the Hackfest sparked off a great deal of discussion. Tom Igoe, is an Associate Arts Professor at Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) in NYU, and runs a truly inter-disciplinary course that takes in a hundred graduate students a year from different backgrounds (dancers, musicians engineers, librarians) and trains them in communications technologies, programming, electronics, media production and app development. All useful skills for developing citizen science projects!
One of the themes is to examine sustainable practices, and think about solving environment issues guided by students own motivations. One project, ‘Botanicals’
uses a simple temperature and humidity sensor that tweets you when your plant
is sick. The group is also working to improve the work of conservationists that track monkeys in the forests.
Digital fabrication (more customer-centric “maker” culture) can also be used for humanitarian research goals, and ITP are working alongside UNICEF. Some projects have implications for healthcare/assistive technology. Students have designed a special balance board to help stroke victims regain their balance using micro controllers with two pressure sensors.
Digital fabrication (more customer-centric “maker” culture) can also be used for humanitarian research goals, and ITP are working alongside UNICEF. Some projects have implications for healthcare/assistive technology. Students have designed a special balance board to help stroke victims regain their balance using micro controllers with two pressure sensors.
Most of the tools used by students are developed at low cost and are simple to use. Tom is also a co-founder of Arduino, the open source hardware platform for electronics prototyping platform. It’s flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.
ITP Alumni often come back for Summer School for refresher courses, and some projects
are transferred into a real world context. Two ex-students, a carpenter and dancer set up
Groundlab, and have designed a Lion collar (with inbuilt
GSM/GPS sensors) to help African farmers. When wild lions come close to a farm-yard area the collar sends an SMS
to the farmer to alert them.
Takeaways from the presentation: "A project only really makes a difference when you can see how it reflects on your own life, and others lives. It’s all about generating ideas, and it is worth being promiscuous with your own ideas. The 'things' we make are less important than the relationships they support. We can get lost in the novelty unless we remember why we are developing the 'thing' in the first place."
Citizen science, getting stuck in
Science is sometime shown as gleaming labs and shiny white coats, we all know that is not how it really is. Two talks from the second afternoon session at the London Citizen Cyberscience Summit showed how far this view can be from reality.
Lilian Pintea from the Jane Goodall Instituteis using community based monitoring in western Tanzania to protect the chimpanzee and their forest habitats. They use a holistic approach engaging and empowering communities to look after their natural resources (including chimpanzees). Based on Google's Open Data Kit they get locals to get identify and tag local landmarks. However it is not always so high tech they have pulled data from maps drawn in the sand. It is still a bottom up approach, with the team just being a catalyst and facilitator, providing tools, training and stipends.
Jon Parsons from the Global Canopy Programme is using Technology to enable non-technical people to record the natural environment. He started his work in the UK with the Woodland Trust with a project digitising phenology (plant and animal life cycle events) datasets from as far back as 1736. They then asked for help from the public to do observations on ancient trees and the BBC programme Springwatch got involved and they had a massive uptake. They now have 75,000 catalogued and validated and almost 20,000 more. He then moved to more foreign climes, Guyana. The project uses a native community to monitor, record and verify areas and landmarks in the rainforest. It was not a normal project testing included making sure the phones could survive a dunking and mango fall! One of the stranger problems the encountered was that older members of teh community had very dried out skin so could not use the touch screen without licking their fingers first.
These are only 2 of many projects showing that citizens are not just people sitting at home analysing data on their home PCs, sometimes they are local tribes avoiding falling mangos.
Lilian Pintea from the Jane Goodall Instituteis using community based monitoring in western Tanzania to protect the chimpanzee and their forest habitats. They use a holistic approach engaging and empowering communities to look after their natural resources (including chimpanzees). Based on Google's Open Data Kit they get locals to get identify and tag local landmarks. However it is not always so high tech they have pulled data from maps drawn in the sand. It is still a bottom up approach, with the team just being a catalyst and facilitator, providing tools, training and stipends.
Jon Parsons from the Global Canopy Programme is using Technology to enable non-technical people to record the natural environment. He started his work in the UK with the Woodland Trust with a project digitising phenology (plant and animal life cycle events) datasets from as far back as 1736. They then asked for help from the public to do observations on ancient trees and the BBC programme Springwatch got involved and they had a massive uptake. They now have 75,000 catalogued and validated and almost 20,000 more. He then moved to more foreign climes, Guyana. The project uses a native community to monitor, record and verify areas and landmarks in the rainforest. It was not a normal project testing included making sure the phones could survive a dunking and mango fall! One of the stranger problems the encountered was that older members of teh community had very dried out skin so could not use the touch screen without licking their fingers first.
These are only 2 of many projects showing that citizens are not just people sitting at home analysing data on their home PCs, sometimes they are local tribes avoiding falling mangos.
e-infrastructures for Citizen Science - an EU perspective
Providing an EU perspective on the important links between citizen science and e-infrastructures, was Kirsti Ala-Mutka who is a Project Officer at the GEANT and e-Infrastructures unit of the European Commission DG Information Society and an expert in online networks and learning.
The EU provides high-speed connectivity for researchers to set up collaboration platforms, which have a global dimension. Citizen Science is helping with building this global dimension and there is great potential for collaboration. The EU wants to citizens to become much more involved, with greater global collaboration between amateur and professional scientists, to create new user communities.
Kirsti's talk provided some examples on how Citizen Scientists can work together with EU e-infrastructures:
• Data collection and infrastructure development
• Citizen Science provides a highly distributed computation resource
• Providing new ideas for developing tools and practices
...and how EU e-infrastructures can help citizen scientists:
• Persistent data storage solutions
• Remote access to specific resources and equipment
• Strategy and inter-operability support for worldwide collaboration.
Kirsti is interested in further ideas/suggestions from Citizen CyberScience Summit delegates on open access, and shared some developments:
• Open access pilot in FP7 in all e-infrastructures
• Open access publications and data infrastructure- OpenAIRE, EUDAT
• Tools and models for citizen science-Gloria, Discover the Cosmos
• Roadmap on e-infrastructures for Open Science
Questions asked during the session included: Should citizen science have specific, own programmes or be seen as part of broader e-infrastructure development activities? How important is it to have collaborations between citizen science initiatives and discipline-based “professional” research communities? How to best encourage citizen science initiatives for preparing proposals? Are there any gaps in certain areas?
The EU provides high-speed connectivity for researchers to set up collaboration platforms, which have a global dimension. Citizen Science is helping with building this global dimension and there is great potential for collaboration. The EU wants to citizens to become much more involved, with greater global collaboration between amateur and professional scientists, to create new user communities.
Kirsti's talk provided some examples on how Citizen Scientists can work together with EU e-infrastructures:
• Data collection and infrastructure development
• Citizen Science provides a highly distributed computation resource
• Providing new ideas for developing tools and practices
...and how EU e-infrastructures can help citizen scientists:
• Persistent data storage solutions
• Remote access to specific resources and equipment
• Strategy and inter-operability support for worldwide collaboration.
Kirsti is interested in further ideas/suggestions from Citizen CyberScience Summit delegates on open access, and shared some developments:
• Open access pilot in FP7 in all e-infrastructures
• Open access publications and data infrastructure- OpenAIRE, EUDAT
• Tools and models for citizen science-Gloria, Discover the Cosmos
• Roadmap on e-infrastructures for Open Science
Questions asked during the session included: Should citizen science have specific, own programmes or be seen as part of broader e-infrastructure development activities? How important is it to have collaborations between citizen science initiatives and discipline-based “professional” research communities? How to best encourage citizen science initiatives for preparing proposals? Are there any gaps in certain areas?
So what is 'Extreme Citizen Science'?
How does EXTREME citizen science differ from the traditional Citizen Science approach?
Yesterday's final session was delivered by CCC Summit co-sponsors - University College London’s interdisciplinary ‘Extreme Citizen Science’ (ExCiteS) research group - which launched their exciting project in April last year.
ExcCiteS co-founder, Muki Haklay (professor of geographic information science), explained that extreme citizen science is about enabling any community around the globe to start a Citizen Science project that will help them deal with issues that concern them. exCiteS have been collaborating with a number of communities - from housing estates in London to hunter-gatherers and forest villagers in the Congo Basin. We'll cover more about their activities later today!
‘Extreme’ in this context means extremely collaborative science which is where a community identifies and defines their own problems, and collectively find a solution (via data collection and analysis) using adaptable scientific tools and methods. With this innovative and pro-actice approach, scientists can take full advantage of both public knowledge and creativity.
ExCiteS aims to take Citizen Science to the next level (see table below) encouraging a wider participation and providing a set of tools that can be used by any user, regardless of their background and level of literacy.
One project, developed by ExCiteS Jerome Lewis, a UCL Lecturer in Social Anthropology is supporting conservation efforts in both the Congo and South Cameroon by supporting local forest communities to better represent themselves to outsiders. Jerome has helped the local communities describe their issues and specific problems via simple and easily translateable tools (such as maps and icons) and hand-held devices (e.g. GPS instruments).
Forest -based villagers have been able to isolate, prioritise and map out sacred resources thereby mediating conservation efforts so forestry companies can avoid destroying local resources.
Muki also outlined some of the challenges faced by extreme citizen science:
Data collection devices are now a reality, but unfortunately the marginalised and poor still remain side-lined.
Analysis tends to be dominated by scientists and we need to develop analytic tools accessible to all citizen scientists in order to realise its potential.
Methods for motivating and ensuring effective participation is crucial but those groups most in need of support are still largely excluded for example: rural, semi or non literate, and people living in vulnerable communities.
Yesterday's final session was delivered by CCC Summit co-sponsors - University College London’s interdisciplinary ‘Extreme Citizen Science’ (ExCiteS) research group - which launched their exciting project in April last year.
ExcCiteS co-founder, Muki Haklay (professor of geographic information science), explained that extreme citizen science is about enabling any community around the globe to start a Citizen Science project that will help them deal with issues that concern them. exCiteS have been collaborating with a number of communities - from housing estates in London to hunter-gatherers and forest villagers in the Congo Basin. We'll cover more about their activities later today!
‘Extreme’ in this context means extremely collaborative science which is where a community identifies and defines their own problems, and collectively find a solution (via data collection and analysis) using adaptable scientific tools and methods. With this innovative and pro-actice approach, scientists can take full advantage of both public knowledge and creativity.
ExCiteS aims to take Citizen Science to the next level (see table below) encouraging a wider participation and providing a set of tools that can be used by any user, regardless of their background and level of literacy.
One project, developed by ExCiteS Jerome Lewis, a UCL Lecturer in Social Anthropology is supporting conservation efforts in both the Congo and South Cameroon by supporting local forest communities to better represent themselves to outsiders. Jerome has helped the local communities describe their issues and specific problems via simple and easily translateable tools (such as maps and icons) and hand-held devices (e.g. GPS instruments).
Forest -based villagers have been able to isolate, prioritise and map out sacred resources thereby mediating conservation efforts so forestry companies can avoid destroying local resources. Muki also outlined some of the challenges faced by extreme citizen science:
Data collection devices are now a reality, but unfortunately the marginalised and poor still remain side-lined.
Analysis tends to be dominated by scientists and we need to develop analytic tools accessible to all citizen scientists in order to realise its potential.
Methods for motivating and ensuring effective participation is crucial but those groups most in need of support are still largely excluded for example: rural, semi or non literate, and people living in vulnerable communities.
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Exploring the science of citizen science
Francois Taddei gave a great talk today at the Citizen Cyberscience Summit and boiled it down to "Do we need a science of citizen science?". Based at the Center for Research and Interdisciplinary at Paris Descartes University he even changed the title of his talk at the last minute after watching the earlier talks. However he brought up some great questions that could shape the future of citizen science.
There are some important synergies between science education and technology but how can how can citizen science be brought in? The thing is both technology and science are evolving at an unimaginable rate (a mobile phone can now be a microscope). But education is only really a 19th century innovation and is evolving a lot slower. It is changing now though, children now do real science or publish papers in peer reviewed journals.
Hand in hand with this is citizen cyberscience opening science to the public, for example Foldit is in some respects a game but it solves real scientifc problems but also is being used to improve the methodology being used by teh protein folding community. What Francois wanted to know was can we do the same for science education?
The old model was the "teacher" was catalyst and moving towards contributing to the frontier of knowledge is slow, you could be doing a PhD before you get to actual do new cutting edge research. Citizen science takes anyone and everyone to the frontier. What is the next step? Sometimes projects only get the public involved in one aspect. They just donate their computer to crunch or just recognise patterns and shapes. They should get involved in all aspects; creating models, planning analysis and doing the experimentation.
He did leave us with some open questions:
There are some important synergies between science education and technology but how can how can citizen science be brought in? The thing is both technology and science are evolving at an unimaginable rate (a mobile phone can now be a microscope). But education is only really a 19th century innovation and is evolving a lot slower. It is changing now though, children now do real science or publish papers in peer reviewed journals.
Hand in hand with this is citizen cyberscience opening science to the public, for example Foldit is in some respects a game but it solves real scientifc problems but also is being used to improve the methodology being used by teh protein folding community. What Francois wanted to know was can we do the same for science education?
The old model was the "teacher" was catalyst and moving towards contributing to the frontier of knowledge is slow, you could be doing a PhD before you get to actual do new cutting edge research. Citizen science takes anyone and everyone to the frontier. What is the next step? Sometimes projects only get the public involved in one aspect. They just donate their computer to crunch or just recognise patterns and shapes. They should get involved in all aspects; creating models, planning analysis and doing the experimentation.
He did leave us with some open questions:
- Are the best projects top down, bottom up, co-constructed
- Who benefits? Who should benefit? Science, companies, contributors society
- How can we maximise learning through research while contributing to the field of citizen science
- Can we analyse and model citizen science processes
- What would a particular discipline need to do to benefit from citizen science?
- What is the optimal division of labour between man and machine, citizen and pro individual and collective.
Citizen Science Around the World
Around the Citizen Science world in 80 minutes!
Citizen cyberscience is truly a global trend and the landscape is evolving rapidly. During the second afternoon session we heard from projects in China, Brazil, South Africa and South East Asia. Even though projects are initially set up in specific regions, they attract volunteers across the globe often tackling widespread humanitarian problems such as improving access to clean water (Computing for Clean Water), or mitigating the devastating of earthquakes (SE Quaker Catcher) and monitoring deforestation (Forest Watchers).
Wenjing Wu from the Chinese Academy of Science told us that in China, volunteer computing has grown in popularity by nearly 25% in the last year. She gave us an insight into the ‘Computing for Clean Water’ (C4CW) project which is the first Citizen Cyberscience project to be established by Chinese Scientists. The project has the support of IBM’s World Community Grid.
Clean water is one of the UN Millennium Goals. Worldwide 1.2 billon people lack access to safe drinking water, and 2.6 billion have little or no sanitation, which is a big problem for China and its growing population. The ultimate goal of this research is deeper insight into how to build a new generation of cheap water filters, to alleviate the pressing demand for clean water. The physical mechanism of filters is not fully understood, and requires the insight of data from thousands of realistic computer simulations.
Earthquake safety and mitigating the devastating effects of seismic activity is a responsibility shared by billions worldwide. The Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) provides software so that individuals can join together to improve earthquake monitoring, earthquake awareness, and the science of earthquakes. Taiwan is located on the convergent plate boundary zone between the Eurasia and the Philippine-Sea plates. Eric Yen from the Academia Sinica, presented the SE Asia Quaker Shake - a project that aims to encourage locals (including high school students/teachers) in quake prone areas such as Taiwan to join in and monitor signs for aftershocks using sensor technology.
Deforestation is responsible for 20% of the greenhouse gases, and a major cause of global concern. The exact rate at which rainforests are presently being destroyed is not known. Daniel Lambrana Gonzalez (Citizen Cyberscience Centre) introduced a Brazilian volunteer-powered project, Forest Watchers, which is building a global network of volunteer to monitor forests across the world with limited traditional means of self-monitoring.The project asks volunteers to check for signs of deforested areas through Satellite images. Join them for a Hackfest on Saturday. Results from the project will be presented at the Rio+20 summit on global sustainability at the end of June!
Citizen cyberscience is truly a global trend and the landscape is evolving rapidly. During the second afternoon session we heard from projects in China, Brazil, South Africa and South East Asia. Even though projects are initially set up in specific regions, they attract volunteers across the globe often tackling widespread humanitarian problems such as improving access to clean water (Computing for Clean Water), or mitigating the devastating of earthquakes (SE Quaker Catcher) and monitoring deforestation (Forest Watchers).
Wenjing Wu from the Chinese Academy of Science told us that in China, volunteer computing has grown in popularity by nearly 25% in the last year. She gave us an insight into the ‘Computing for Clean Water’ (C4CW) project which is the first Citizen Cyberscience project to be established by Chinese Scientists. The project has the support of IBM’s World Community Grid.
Clean water is one of the UN Millennium Goals. Worldwide 1.2 billon people lack access to safe drinking water, and 2.6 billion have little or no sanitation, which is a big problem for China and its growing population. The ultimate goal of this research is deeper insight into how to build a new generation of cheap water filters, to alleviate the pressing demand for clean water. The physical mechanism of filters is not fully understood, and requires the insight of data from thousands of realistic computer simulations.
Earthquake safety and mitigating the devastating effects of seismic activity is a responsibility shared by billions worldwide. The Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) provides software so that individuals can join together to improve earthquake monitoring, earthquake awareness, and the science of earthquakes. Taiwan is located on the convergent plate boundary zone between the Eurasia and the Philippine-Sea plates. Eric Yen from the Academia Sinica, presented the SE Asia Quaker Shake - a project that aims to encourage locals (including high school students/teachers) in quake prone areas such as Taiwan to join in and monitor signs for aftershocks using sensor technology.
Deforestation is responsible for 20% of the greenhouse gases, and a major cause of global concern. The exact rate at which rainforests are presently being destroyed is not known. Daniel Lambrana Gonzalez (Citizen Cyberscience Centre) introduced a Brazilian volunteer-powered project, Forest Watchers, which is building a global network of volunteer to monitor forests across the world with limited traditional means of self-monitoring.The project asks volunteers to check for signs of deforested areas through Satellite images. Join them for a Hackfest on Saturday. Results from the project will be presented at the Rio+20 summit on global sustainability at the end of June!
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