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I spent last Thursday and Friday at the Citizen Cyberscience Summit, listening to a series of presentations about how the public are collaborating with scientists to achieve together what neither group can do alone. It was a fascinating couple of days which illustrated the vast variety of projects either running currently or in the pipeline. We’ve all heard of SETI@home, but there are projects now across a diverse set of disciplines, from botany to history, astronomy, meteorology, particle physics, seismology and beyond.

What was notable, however, was that the majority of the projects were about volunteers donating CPU cycles rather

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This is the presentation that I gave this week at the Nordic Supersearch 2010 conference in Oslo organised by the Norwegian Institute of Journalism. To help explain the presentation, I was looking at the crush of information that people are dealing with, the 5 exabytes of information that Eric Schmidt of Google says that we’re creating every two days.

I think search-based filters such as Google Realtime are only part of the answer. Many of the first generation real-time search engines help filter the firehouse

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FoltIt is a protein folding video game. Proteins are chains of amino acids, and they form a unique 3D structure which is key to their function.

Distributed computing isn’t enough to understand protein structures. Game where you try to fold the protein yourself. Game design is difficult, but even more difficult when constrained by the scientific problem you are trying to solving. You can’t take out the fiddly bits. But players have to stay engaged.

Approach the game development as science. Collect data on how people progress through the game so that they could change the training so that they

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Quake-Catcher Network: Using distributed sensors to record earthquakes, to put that data into existing regional seismic networks.

Aim: To better understand earthquakes and mitigate seismic risk by increasing density of seismic observations.

Uses new low-cost sensors that measure acceleration, so can see how much ground shakes during earthquakes. Using BOINC platform. Need volunteers to run sensors, or laptop with sensors.

Why do we need this extra seismic data. Need an idea of what the seismic risk is in an area, look at the major fault systems, population density, and type of buildings.

Where are the faults? Want the sensors in

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GridRepublic, trying to raise awareness of volunteer computing. Provide people with a list of BOINC projects, can manage all your projects in one website.

Progress Thru Processors, trying to reach people in Facebook. Join up, one click process, projects post updates to hopefully reach volunteers’ friends.

Distributed thinking – what can be done if you draw on the intellectual resources of your network instead of just CPUs. How would you have to organise to make use of available cognition.

What is thinking? Marvin Minksky, The Society of Mind, “minds are built from mindless stuff’. Thinking is made up of small

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Interested in observation, and particularly extreme weather such as torrential rain, storms.

Morning of 16 Oct 1987, Great Storm in SE England, have weather records for that day, coloured by pressure. Low pressure – storminess. Can we understand its dynamics, can we predict it? Take observations and model them.

Previous big storm was 1703, so if we’re interested in climatology of storms, we need 100s years of records, and need them for everywhere in the world. Europe is well represented, but, say, Antarctica is not. Even in 1987, we didn’t have good records for there.

1918, rather badly observed period of

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Archives, physical or digital. All sorts of documents, but many are important to historians, e.g. scraps of paper from early days of computing can be very important later on.

Time consuming to find things. Dangers to sustainability – stuff gets lost, thrown away, destroyed by accident or fire.

Digital archives, easier to access, but often funding runs out and we need them to last.

NOF-Digitise programme, ran for 5 years, ended 6 years ago, awarded £50m to 155 projects. What happened to them?

• 30 websites still exist and have been enhanced since
• 10 absorbed into larger archives
• 83 websites exist

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Looks at a number of projects, including spatialepidemiology.net which tracks MRSA spread, and Bd-Maps which looks at amphibian health.

Have been developing a smartphone app so that people in the field can add data. Use GPS so location aware, can take in stills/video.

EpiCollect, can submit info and access data others have submitted, and do data filtering. Android and iPhone versions. Very generic method, any questionnaires could be used for any subject.

Fully generic version at EpiCollect.net. Anyone can create a project, design a form for data collection, load the project up, go out and collect data, and then have

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Sudoku comes from the Latin Square, invented in middle age, Leonhard Euler. But Sudoku related to the Colouring Problem, how do you colour each node in a pentagram/star so none have a neighbour the same colour. Think of Sudoku numbers as colours, each square must be different to its neighbour.

Solving sudoku for all sizes – it’s not just 9 x 9 – is an NP-complete problem, i.e “damn hard”!

How many solutions does Sudoku have? For 4 x 4 Latin Square, 576 versions, and for 9 x 9… there are lots and lots, i.e. 6 x 10 ^ 21. Without

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CAS researcher focuses on where volunteer computing and thinking can help. Well known in China, and well trusted.

Chinese volunteer demographics, 42k BOINC users, 420m total internet users, 1.33bn total population. Most volunteers come from eastern developed part of China. Ave age around 27, 90% male, most are students, IT pros, mid-income workers.

EQUN.com, project started in 2003 to translate and provide information on other volunteer computing projects.

Concerns about volunteer computing:

• Barriers
  • Language barriers
  • Complication of registration and participation
  • Lack of consciousness of science and contribution
• Security
  • Internet environment unsafe
  • Piracy
  • Usage of public computers
• Energy
  • Based on coal

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