High School Students to talk at Citizen Cyberscience Summit

This year's Second London Citizen Cyberscience Summit, a sequel to the first one barely 18 months ago, which really signaled the launch of the CCC, is shaping up to be a big deal!

Of course, lots of big name researchers will be there. But what made the first Summit so special, and we're hoping will be the hallmark of the second one, is the participation of a good deal of real citizen scientists. Indeed, a whole panel session will be devoted to "the citizens of citizen science".

A novelty this year will be a presentation by two high school students. Not just any high school, mind you. These students go to the Simon Langton Grammar School in Canterbury, where Becky Parker, a super teacher, gets kids involved in building cosmic ray detectors and designing satellites.

The students, Louis Wilson and Chris Cundy, will talk about CERN@school, an ambitious programme to build a network of cosmic ray detectors across the UK and one day the whole world.

Becky's students have also been involved in testing the latest version of CERN@home, called Test4Theory, where volunteers can simulate an atom-smasher on their home computer... and help theoretical physicists at CERN hunt for new fundamental particles like the Higgs boson.

The session with Louis and Chris should be an exciting one. It kicks off this Friday 17/2 at 14:00. Nice of Becky to let her students play hooky and go to London for the day!

2nd London Citizen Cyberscience Summit 16-18 February

On your marks…

The London Citizen Cyberscience Summit in 2010 brought together for the first time volunteers and scientists from a wide range of Web-based science projects, ranging from volunteer computing (SETI@home,ClimatePrediction.net) to volunteer thinking (GalaxyZoo, Herbaria@home) to volunteer sensing (EpiCollect, NoiseTube) and much more. Historians, journalists, teachers and businessmen all brought their angle on citizen cyberscience to the event. Above all, it was a chance for the some of the millions of volunteers who make citizen cyberscience so successful to tell their story.

Get set…

The Second London Citizen Cyberscience Summit, 16-18 February 2012, promises to be just as pioneering in its scope, and even more innovative in its format – ranging from classical academic seminar on the first day, through to full-fledged open hardware hackfest on the last. It will take place at the Royal Geographical Institute (on the 16th) and at UCL (17th and 18th), in London.

Go!

On Day 1, we set the scene. (Thursday 16th February 2012, Royal Geographical Institute). Meet some of the leading figures in citizen science and explore the process of public engagement and participation, outreach of citizen science to the developing world, and the undertaking of "extreme" citizen scienceprojects, in rain forests, arctic tundra, or urban jungles.

On Day 2, we look beneath the surface. (Friday 17th February 2012, UCL). Experts will discuss thehardware and software that powers citizen cyberscience. There will be a panel discussion with citizen scientists on why participation and engagement, and a showcase of new and future citizen science projects. In the evening, we'll start planning the next day's hands-on sessions.

On Day 3, we get down to business…together! (Saturday 18th February 2012) This will include furtherunconference sessions, and a hackfest for development of hardware and software prototypes, demos and mock-ups, with awards for the most innovative creations!

• Register and buy your ticket
• Propose talks and demo

A hackfestive season

The Citizen Cyberscience Centre co-organized two hackfests in November, rounding off a year that has seen us run or co-organize hackfests on five continents, in places as diverse as Beijing, Rio de Janeiro and Berlin.

The November hackfests were in New York and Cape Town (pictured here, courtesy Daniel Lombraña González).

In New York, the ecoHackNYC event was organized by Javier de la Torre and his colleagues at the company Vizzuality, and hosted in the funky surroundings of New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Programme, where artists put technology to weird and wonderful use. Groups hacked on everything from tracking the mega-carbon-footprint of the mega-rich when they fly their private jets, to tracking where toilet waste actually goes after New Yorkers flush.

With colleagues from Brazil, we worked on testing Bossa, an open-source platform for volunteer thinking, which we want to use for a deforestation monitoring project called ForestWatchers (which was just selected for a grant from the Open Society Foundations).

In Cape Town (actually, nearby Muizenberg), an Africa@home Data/Science Hackfest was hosted by the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences. We'd run a workshop on volunteer computing at AIMS back in 2007, which in many ways was a trigger for the creation of the Citizen Cyberscience Centre, so it was nice to come back again, and Jan Groenewald was as ever a fantastically effective and flexible host.

Africa@home was co-organized with a bunch of Fellows from the Shuttleworth Foundation: Kathi Fletcher of Connexions, Mark Horner of Siyavula, Philipp Schmidt of P2PU and last but not least, Rufus Pollock of the Open Knowledge Foundation.

Volunteer thinking was very much the flavour of the event, with projects on digitizing 19th century notebooks of Bushmen history, spotting potential breeding grounds for malaria in images taken by field workers and analyzing radio astronomy data in search of signals from solar flares. Rufus raised the stakes by launching pyBossa, together with Daniel Lombraña González of the CCC: it's a python-based version of the open-source Bossa platform that should make it much easier to build volunteer thinking projects.

Next year, the hackfestivities continue: London, Taipei and Bangalore are on the agenda...watch this space!

LHC@home 2.0 - towards a virtual atom smasher

The Citizen Cyberscience Centre was in the news just about everywhere last week, thanks to a CERN press release that mentioned the testing of the new LHC@home 2.0 volunteer computing project. The CCC has played a crucial role in developing this project, thanks to support from the Shuttleworth Foundation.

We are flabbergasted! The interest has exceeded the wildest dreams of all of us at the CCC and our CERN colleagues. And thanks to the press coverage and avid retweeting of the news, the response in terms of number of people trying to register to this new project has been phenomenal.

A week ago, we reached 8000 registered users which pushed the number of computers simultaneously connected to our server well over 1000. To give a sense of scale, with just 100 simultaneous connections we had already reached the equivalent of all the computing power at CERN that the physicists who developed this project have access to. So getting more than 10x that in just a few days boggled our minds - and also bogged down our servers! We're going to open gradually to more participants in the near future. We'll then stabilize for a while before further increases.

This was announced as a beta-test to explore the limitations of our system, and we certainly succeeded in doing that, thanks to the support of the volunteer community. Particular thanks to all the experienced BOINC users in the forums who have been patiently explaining to newcomers that this sort of thing is normal in a beta-test. And hats off to our technical crew (which is basically just Artem and Anton in Geneva and Daniel in Madrid) who have been working literally around the clock to get the system running smoothly again.

Just what does this mean for LHC physics? To put that in colourful perspective, here's a quote from a great article by Jacqui Hayes, editor of International Science Grid this Week, interviewing amongst other Peter Skands, the lead physicist on the project:

“We would never be able to simulate as many events as the LHC,” Skands said. “The fastest Monte Carlo I have would produce one collision per millisecond, on average. But the LHC produces 40 million per second.”

At this point of our interview, Skands paused and leant back in his chair. “How many volunteers would we need to produce as many events as the LHC?” He shrugged as he said it, and he meant it merely as a rhetorical question, a nod to the incomprehensible size and speed of the LHC. But, as he started to answer his own question, it suddenly dawned on him that he could actually produce a fully-fledged virtual atom smasher if just 40,000 volunteers ran his Monte Carlo simulations at the same time.

Until that point, Skands had been hoping for perhaps 10,000 volunteers on his project.“I never even considered that a possibility before now,” said Skands. “Honest to God, that would be a fun thing to do!”

Fun, indeed! Who knows, maybe by the time you read this blog post, the virtual atom smasher will have caught up with the data rate of it's real world cousin.

First we take Beijing, then we take Berlin

Last week, the Citizen Cyberscience Centre ran its third "hackfest" this year, in collaboration with the Open Knowledge Foundation, as a run-up to this year's Open Knowledge Conference in Berlin. Entitled the Open Science and Social Science Workshop, it involved about 20 participants - some scientists, some programmers and some enthusiastic citizens. (The CCC also organized an Open Science Panel at the conference, which was surprisingly well attended, given that it was in parallel with free software guru Richard Stallman.)

Like previous hackfests in Beijing and Taipei in March, and in Rio de Janeiro in May, the objective was to spend time creating demos and prototypes that could act as catalysts for future citizen cyberscience projects.

The topics tackled in Berlin ran from how to get volunteer computing programmes to run on Android mobile phones to how to digitize tables of economics data currently being scanned by the Brazilian government (an example is posted here), a project that requires volunteer help as optical character recognition programmes cannot figure out the structure of a table.

Even though this hackfest only lasted a day - previous one have stretched over two - some inspiring demos were created. Rufus Pollock, co-founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation, proving to be one of the most ardent coders. And the participants kept hacking until they were thrown out by the venue manager. Now that's dedication!

The hacker from Ipanema

We're just wrapping up the first day of the Brasil@Home hackfest in beautiful Rio de Janeiro, just a short walk from the famous Copacabana and Ipanema beaches.

Amazingly, despite the proximity of sun, sea and sand, we managed to keep 16 scientists, programmers and citizen science enthusiasts cooped up in a neon-lit room for nine hours of hacking. It seems almost cruel. But we didn't have to lock the door, really!

What did we work on? Better ways to visualize climate data produced by the citizen cyberscience projects Old Weather and ClimatePrediction.net. A new volunteer computing project to look for drugs that can combat neglected parasite-borne diseases in Brazil. A plan to get a huge amount of scanned historical economics data about Brazil digitized, with the help of volunteers. And a commitment by enthusiastic local participants to set up a Brazilian citizen cyberscience website, and get the word out in Brazil. (You can read all about this and much more on the hackfest etherpad that the experts and participants jointly edited.)

And that's just the results of day 1. We're expecting a lot more from day 2. But right now we're off for dinner...by the beach.

Brasil@home - the tour begins!

Brasil@home é uma iniciativa para promover Ciber-Ciência Cidadã

In a few hours, a bunch of scientists and software developers will take off from Madrid, Paris, Geneva, San Francisco and London, headed for Brazil. We're on a one-week lecture tour and hackfest extravaganza in Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo.

Our objective: get more Brazilian scientists, software developers and citizens to embrace citizen-based science on the Web. If you think that sounds like a fun idea, join the tour!

Leia sobre isso aqui: http://www.citizencyberscience.net/brasilathome/index.htm

The 7 myths of cyberscience

Today we're at the London Citizen Cyberscience workshop at UCL. We've all gathered together to discuss how best to promote collaboration on citizen cyberscience between the main London institutions and to share the experiences of those that have worked on/are working on citizen cyberscience projects.

The morning was kicked off by Francois Grey, coordinator of the Citizen Cyberscience Centr, who gave us a quick intro into citizen cyberscience including the following seven myths about it:

1. It doesn’t produce real science
Projects such as malariacontrol.net have produced real published scientific results, which are used by governments to make important decisions. 

2. It won’t work for my science
From biology to the humanities there are case studies for all types of citizen cyberscience projects.

3. Nobody will be interested in my science
When starting up LHC@home the creators thought nobody would be interested in the project; they needn't have worried. One thousand people downloaded the application in the first 24 hours, with no publicity effort at all. 

4. You can’t trust results from ordinary people
In fact crowdsourcing large groups of people will often be more reliable than one expert doing all the work, as they're far less likely to make mistakes through e.g. tiredness.

5. It is energetically hugely wasteful
As long as volunteers have chosen the right settings running a cyberscience project on your computer only add on a little bit of energy.

6. It doesn’t really engage people in science
While some volunteers do just download and run applications, others post strategies onto wikis, contribute to message boards and truly engage with the problems they're helping with.

7. One day we will run out of volunteers
Everyday more and more people are getting connected to the internet, whether by computer or mobile devices such as phones. The possibilities for citizen cyberscience are almost endless.

Videos online!

For anybody who missed out on the fab talks at last months Citizen Cyberscience Summit now's your chance to catch up! We've put videos of all the talks from the two days up onto the Anatomy Theatre website especially for you. And as an added bonus all the slides from the talks are on there too.

What are you waiting for? Check it out now!

The Summit on radio

Thanks to BBC's Digital Planet you can now hear from the Citizen Cyberscience summit online.

The lovely Gareth Mitchell from Digital Planet spent two days at the Summit interviewing our fantastic speakers and finding all about the research coming out of the citizen cyberscience community. What's more, he even found time to chair one of our sessions!

This special edition of Digital Planet is available to listen to on BBC's iPlayer. So what are you waiting for? Head over there now!

Twitter Conversation

During the two days of the summit we encouraged people to contribute via twitter and to use the #cybersci hashtag. We have collected all of those tweets into this post (yeah it's a long one). You can get the entire archive of tweets from here. You can see more after the jump.

Discussion questions

These are the 9 questions we are discussing at the summit now. We will be trying to get answers from the session and online (tweet with #cybersci or comment here) and build a citizen cyberscience manifesto. After the jump updated with notes from the session.

Citizen Cyberscience Wrap-up

So it's the end of the very first Citizen Cyberscience Summit here in London and, although the event has been full of discussion, I think everyone can agree that we've had a successful couple of days. To round up the Summit we had a quick chat with Francois Grey, coordinator of the Citizen Cyberscience Centre and one of the brains behind the Summit. Watch below for Francois' thoughts on the event and what he thinks we've achieved in the last two days.

Creating maps for Africa

One of the projects presented this morning was AfricaMap, a Citizen Cyberscience Centre project, which aims to use volunteers in Africa to create maps for Africa. We chatted to Peter Amoako Yirenkyi who told us a little more about the project.




From GridCast

The Citizen Cyberscience Summit online

This morning we've been hearing about volunteer computing projects in the pipeline. From solving Suduko puzzles to creating detailed maps of Africa, the possibilities of citizen cyberscience appear to be endless and there are some amazing ideas coming out of the Summit today.

However, if you're not lucky enough to be at the Summit yourself, there's still plenty of ways to keep up with all the action online. We're streaming the talks live on the web at the King's College Anatomy Theatre and Museum website. And for those of you in America or Australia, we're also hoping to archive filmed versions of the talks, plus the speakers presentations after the Summit is over, so there's no need to wake up before sunrise or stay up until the wee hours of the night.

For a quick snapshot of the attendees thoughts on the speakers and talks take a look at Twitter, just search for the #cybersci tag. And last but not least don't forget to keep checking the blogosphere. We'll be updating this blog throughout the day. There are also some great summaries of all the speakers talks on Suw Charman-Anderson's blog, Strange Attractor, check it out here.

An interview with Becky Parker

One person that got everybody talking yesterday was the amazing Becky Parker, a 'superteacher', from Langton Grammar School in Kent. Becky is inspiring her pupils to get interested in physics by setting up CERN@school, a network of cosmic ray detectors, and her enthusiasm for the project was infectious.

 We grabbed Becky to find out a little more about the project - watch below to find out more about her fab ideas. And if that's not enough, you can read more in this article from iSGTW.



From GridCast

CERN@school @ the Citizen Cyberscience Summit

Today at the Citizen Cyberscience Summit in London has been one of the most lively and entertaining events I’ve attended in ages. Under the banner of citizen cyberscience in all its guises, we’ve heard about human computers from David Grier, finding prime numbers from PrimeGrid, now running to hundreds of thousands of digits, and from the founder of BOINC and SETI@home, David Anderson.

The story of herbaria@home struck a particular chord as well for me – as a former museum curator in a previous life, the idea of using volunteers to help catalogue otherwise inaccessible botanical collections seems like an inspired idea. Instead of spending several weeks in a darkened museum cupboard cataloguing 200 pairs of 19th century spectacles, as I found myself doing a few years ago, today  I could have asked a team of enthusiastic  volunteers to give me a hand from the comfort of their own homes.

Among a host of enthusiastic presenters, a highlight for me was Becky Parker’s  energetic presentation on building cosmic ray detector networks in schools. Through regular trips to CERN her class has had a unique insight into the world of particle physics and cosmic rays – a far cry from the experiments we did in school rolling little trucks down slopes attached to ticker tapes. Becky introduced us to the CERN@school initiative, which sends Medipix detector chips, as used in the Large Hadron Collider, into schools. A pilot group of schools in Kent are 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. Hopefully this is a pilot that will take off into a whole host of schools, bring cyberscience to the citizens of tomorrow.

From Catherine Gater at GridCast

Herbaria@Home

Citizen cyberscience projects don't just help physicists and astronomers. Scientists from all sorts of disciplines can benefit from the efforts put in by citizens across the world.

A Herbaria@home specimen

With this in mind, this morning we heard from Tom Humphrey of the Botanical Society of the British Isles who explained how volunteers are helping to classify UK plant specimens.

His project, Herbaria@Home, asks volunteers to decipher plant specimen labels, providing information such as site name and date. This allows botanists to map these plants and track the spread (or not) of species across the UK. This provides vital biodiversity information which can be used for  future studies of taxonomy, ecology, conservation and genetic biodiversity.

For hard-to-read handwritten labels volunteers need an opportunity to collaborate and discuss with each other, so like many other successful projects Herbaria@home has a very active message board. All information provided by volunteers is open to peer review and can be edited, with the public edit history accessible to all.


As an added bonus, uploading these plant specimens onto the internet for analysis, means that Herbaria@home is opening up the museum's collections of plant material, which are otherwise largely inaccessible.

To date Herbaris@home has classified a total of 70,000 species and looks set to continue well into the future.

From GridCast

The Charity Engine by Mark McAndrew

Mark McAndrew is talking from the Citizen Cyberscience Summit in London about his startup: The Charity Engine
You can find more on their website: http://www.charity-engine.com/



From GridCast

Citizen Cyberscience Summit: Hanny van Arkel's interview

While volunteering for the Galaxy Zoo project, teacher Hanny van Arkel came across an unexplained astronomical object - Hanny's Voorwerp. Hanny tells us more about her find below - you can also read more at her website www.hannysvoorwerp.com




From GridCast