Chandra Clarke

Award-winning entrepreneur. Author. Professional Optimist.

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EyesOnALZ: A Citizen Science project to fight Alzheimer‘s

January 8, 2018 By Chandra Clarke Leave a Comment

Project: EyesOnALZ / Stall Catchers

Alzheimer’s is a terrible disease, robbing many people of quality of life in their final years; it also puts a tremendous burden on family members and caregivers. A new citizen science initiative hopes to change that.

Stall Catchers is the first of two online games being developed at EyesOnALZ. The game will allow participants to look at movies of real blood vessels in mouse brains, and search for “stalls” – clogged capillaries where blood is no longer flowing. By “catching stalls” participants will be able to build up their score, level up, compete in the game leaderboard, and receive digital badges for their various achievements.

Everyone who participates will contribute to Alzheimer’s research at the Schaffer-Nishimura Laboratory (Cornell Dept. of Biomedical Engineering), and help speed up the search for an Alzheimer’s cure by orders of magnitude.

Stall Catchers is the first citizen science game where the public is directly engaged in analyzing Alzheimer’s disease research data. In the first 5 months since Stall Catchers went live, more than 3000 participants have joined the game.

Photo Credit: Stall Catchers Website Screenshot

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Game for a Cause with Decodoku!

October 4, 2016 By Chandra Clarke Leave a Comment

dekodu

Project: Decodoku

I’ve got a really fun project to share with you guys today! Who out there has wasted way more time than they’re proud to admit playing some kind of mindless game on their phone? (*Raises hand*) Candy Crush or 2048, anyone? Yeah, we all probably have a game or two that we use to pass the time when we are waiting in line or need to blow off some steam at the end of a long day. Well, what if you could multitask, and play a few simple, fun games on your phone or iPad, while contributing to scientific research on quantum error correction? That’s an opportunity that Dr. James Wootten, a scientist with the University of Basel, has created with his new app, Decodoku.

Decodoku is totally free, with no ads or in-app purchases. As Dr. Wootten says on his blog, “It’s for science, not for money!” It is currently only offered for iPhone and iPad, though an Android version is on the way. The vision of the project is quite similar to that of this blog–to convince everyday people that you can do science! You don’t have to be a university-tenured scientist in the field of quantum error correction to contribute. You simply play the game, try to get the highest score possible, figure out the methods you used to get there, and, if you’d like to, report your findings to decodoku@gmail.com or tweet @decodoku on Twitter. Dr. Wootten makes it very clear that you are under no obligation to share what you find, and they won’t use it without your permission.

So what exactly is quantum error correction, and how does an entertaining little grid game help us learn more about it? Well, Dr. Wootten gives a handy introduction to quantum error correction and the science behind the game, with some helpful analogies in laymen’s terms in this blog post. In a one-sentence summary, quantum error correction tries to “un-garble” the messages that quantum computers send, which will have naturally-occurring errors over time.

How does this translate to the objective of the two games–ℤ10 and Φ-Λ–in Decodoku? Well, your score is basically the number of moves you managed to make before everything gets too messed up, and the system locks up. If you were a scientist, this would be the amount of time your quantum computer would survive before the errors completely overwhelmed it and it crashed. I won’t get too deep into the nitty-gritty of the rules of the game (basically, you’re trying to find numbers in adjoining grids that add up to 10) but here’s a handy gameplay video, if you’d like a visual example, and for those of you who enjoy code and understanding the inner-workings of a game, there are several in-depth posts about it on the project’s blog. Have fun testing out a new way to kill time as you wait for the bus, and don’t forget to report any tips or tricks you discover in obtaining new high scores–remember, “it’s for science!”

Photo Credit: Pexels

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Is there a doctor in the house?

January 19, 2015 By Chandra Clarke Leave a Comment

Photo Credit: Opensource Handbook of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology
Photo Credit: Opensource Handbook of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology

Project: NanoDoc

Some video games want you to kill invaders from space. Others want you to blow up gems or fruit. NanoDoc wants you to help kill tumors.

As the name implies, NanoDoc is a game designed to have members of the public help design new “nanoparticle” strategies to treat cancer. A nanoparticle is a teeny-tiny particle, anywhere from 1 to 100 nanometers in size, and a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. Nanomedicine is a newer branch of medicine that focuses on using nanotechnology to deliver drugs in a super-targeted way. A very rough analogy for nanomedicine might be this: instead of spraying your entire lawn with gallons of weedkiller and hoping for the best, you would use microscopic devices to seek out and individually destroy weed seeds.

NanoDoc is a nanoparticle simulator. In the first few levels of the game, you earn your “nanodoc licence”; that is, you get trained on how to play. After that, you’ll be given specific challenges to try. Current challenges include detecting a rare event and working on tumor imaging.

According to Sangeeta Bhatia, who runs a lab at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, “we don’t know what the best treatments are for these challenges, or even if there are any good solutions at all! We hope your drive to help in the fight against cancer and learn about nanomedicine will empower you to discover original, creative and efficient nanoparticle strategies we haven’t thought of in the lab.”

To get started, you can register at the site using your email, Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ account. You’ll then be able to take the training and have a go at the game. You can also learn more about nanomedicine and follow the new NanoDoc blog.

 

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Some Citizen Science Predictions

January 5, 2015 By Chandra Clarke Leave a Comment

I’ve been covering the citizen science movement for a very long time now; indeed, I’ve been writing about citizen science in one form or another since before it was really a movement.

Recently, I sat down and had a think about what I had seen in the past, as well as some of trends that I’ve been noticing. Today, I’m going to review some of those and also go out on a limb with some predictions as to where I see citizen science heading.

It’s Definitely a Thing, Now

In the last three or so years, I’ve noticed a sharp increase in the amount of mainstream interest in citizen science. Where it was once just the province of a smaller group of hardcore geeks (think: early adopters of the SETI@Home client), it now seems like everyone is talking about citizen science. Anecdotally, I’ve been interviewed by a fairly wide range of media outlets — everything from CBC Radio to Woman’s World. On the hard data side, this screen shot of the Google Trends entry on citizen science bears this out:

Source: Google Trends
Source: Google Trends

 

There’s More Variety Than Ever

Citizen science projects are busting out all over, so there’s now a really impressive range of both topics and types of projects. Whereas once your choice was between the Christmas Bird Count, deploying BOINC, or playing with images from Mars, now you can do everything from raising Monarch butterflies to being a paleontologist in your kitchen.

Citizen Science is Converging with Other Movements

Open source, participatory civics, activism, maker spaces, crowdfunding: citizen science is part of an even broader shift across many segments of society, and in some cases it’s increasingly hard to see where one movement begins and another ends.

For example, Pybossa is open source software that will allow you to create your own citizen science project; meanwhile the Open Space Agency is open sourcing the plans for pro-astronomy grade telescope. Projects like Skywarn or Safecast are civic applications that want you to help your fellow citizens. Extreme citizen science tries to take the concept to developing countries for an empowering approach, while the DIY and maker crowds dive into all sorts of aspects of science, including biology.

Gaming is Here to Stay

There are an increasing number of citizen science games, some with the data processing and manipulation right out front like EteRNA, and some not quite so much, like Reverse the Odds. This not to be confused with the gamification of citizen science projects: that is, the addition of game elements like leaderboards, badges, scoring, etc., to an otherwise non-game-based project. (The jury is still out as to how effective gamification is at improving user retention.)

Point and Click Projects Are Here to Stay… For a While

Zooniverse has pretty much perfected the model of citizen science projects wherein users are presented with a bit of data (most often an image) and are asked to perform a simple task (usually identify and locate a specific feature). As more and more people get interested in citizen science in general, the platform (and others like it) will likely continue to register new users faster than it ‘loses’ them. This is a good thing, because the participation dropoff curves appear to be pretty steep. Eventually, however, as more interesting ways to do citizen science continue to proliferate, and if we ever see a ‘peak citizen science’ (i.e., the most number of people likely to do citizen science are already doing it), this will no longer be the case.

On the flip side, I think that image processing technology will replace the need for human participation here sooner, rather than later, in part because mega-companies like Google and Baidu are throwing boatloads of money at the problem, and because technology improvement curves are much steeper than we realize.

But Apps are Where It’s At

The number of citizen science apps — and by this I mean the programs that run on tablets or smartphones — is going up, and that has opened up a whole new frontier in citizen science. Whereas before, most citizen science has been about data processing, apps allow for more data collection. Apps like Sound Around You or Loss of the Night are good examples.

However, I think we’ve only just barely scratched the surface of what’s possible with current mobile technology. The average smart phone now comes with an accelerometer, a camera, a video camera, a magnetometer, an ambient light detector, GPS, and obviously, a speaker and a microphone, all as standard equipment. Considering how creative people are getting with simple GoPro cameras and their special mounts, or cameras attached to drones just for fun, there’s clearly a lot of scope for some much more interesting citizen science apps than what we’re currently doing.

That Internet of Things We Keep Hearing About

As sensors become cheaper and cheaper, and the Internet becomes even more ubiquitous, the average citizen, with or without connection to an official citizen science project, will soon be able to measure and track pretty much anything. (Seriously, check out those links to see what’s coming, especially if you’re looking for ideas.) Anyone will be able to deploy sensors, and this will in turn generate huge amounts of highly granular data. Indeed, most of us will deploy sensors, even if not entirely deliberately, because they’re going to be embedded in the products we use.

In some ways, we’re just beginning to build a massive nervous system for ourselves and our planet, and it’s going to teach us all sorts of amazing things. We don’t yet know what we don’t know.

But it’s going to be very interesting. Stay tuned.

 

 

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