Chandra Clarke

Offering Whatever Light I Can

DreamLab for iOS and Android

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Guest post by James Bradley

DreamLab is a volunteer computing app developed by the Vodafone Foundation, in partnership with the Garvan Institute of Medical Research. It uses the idle processing power of smart phones and tablets to speed up cancer research. With the app you can help accelerate cancer genetics and drug research while you sleep. Unlike many other volunteer computing efforts, DreamLab supports Apple iOS devices as well as Android.

Contributing to DreamLab takes only a few simple steps:

  1. Charge your device and connect it to the Internet.
  2. Choose a project or projects to support.
  3. Set the amount of data you want the app to use on Wi-Fi or mobile networks.
  4. Begin powering your projects.

If your mobile network provider is Vodafone UK or Vodafone Australia, the data used by DreamLab is free of charge and does not add to your data limit.

At the present time, there are four projects that can be selected to work on:

  • Demystify by the Garvan Institute
  • DRUGS Phase 3 and Phase 4 by the Imperial College London
  • 3D Genome by AIRC (Italian Association for Cancer Research)

Your contribution to each project and total contribution are tracked through your number of calculations crunched. Your time spent powering DreamLab is tracked as well.

DreamLab can be downloaded for iOS on the App Store and for Android on Google Play:

https://apps.apple.com/app/dreamlab-help-to-fight-cancer/id1273619275

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=au.com.vodafone.dreamlabapp

Roll your own citizen science project

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English: Tools
Some tools to build your own project  (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Previously, I’ve discussed citizen science projects that you can join. Today, I’m going to talk about some tools you can use to create your own citizen science project.

Pybossa

Pybossa bills itself as “the only open source framework for making crowdsourcing projects.” The goal of the software is to allow organizers to complete huge tasks in record time with the help of volunteers.

Programmed in Python and based on the University of California at Berkeley’s Bossa project (the same organization that built BOINC), the framework is good for tasks that require human cognition at scale. This might include things like image classification, transcription, and geocoding. Some projects that are powered by Pybossa include Micropasts and ForestWatchers.

The software comes with a guide to getting started and a few templates to get you going; just using those, you could set up something to transcribe PDF docs, do sound pattern recognition, or phone-based data collection. The full documentation can be found here.

CKAN

CKAN is data hub software that allows organizations (e.g., national and regional governments, companies, researchers, etc.) to quickly and easily publish datasets. It also allows users to share, find, and use data.

The open source code has a fairly extensive feature set. Publishers can publish data via an API, or by importing their data files. They can add metadata, visualize the data with maps, graphs, and tables, and look at analytics to see how users are making use of the data. There is also version control (so publishers know when there has been a change to a dataset) and custom data hub themes (so publishers can customize the look of their portal).

Data users can comment on datasets, “follow” them and be notified of updates, and share information via Twitter or Facebook.

Two sites already using CKAN include http://data.gov.uk/ and http://publicdata.eu/, published by the UK and EU governments respectively. At the UK site, for example, you can get diet and obesity stats or road safety data. A number of apps that make use of the data have been written and listed on this page.

CKAN stands for Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network, and it is a project of the Open Knowledge Foundation.

Poplus

Poplus has more to do with civic engagement than citizen science, but the principles behind the software and the tools I’m linking to here are the same. Poplus calls itself “an international movement that promotes the sharing of software for civic and democratic purposes.” The movement is predicated on the belief that citizens have universal basic civic needs, no matter where they live. With that in mind, volunteers with the movement have created “components” that developers can use, modify, and customize, without having to reinvent the wheel.

“Why should every organization have to write their software from scratch?” organizers note on the Poplus website. “By sharing code, we can make things quicker and easier, freeing up time for the important things.”

Current Poplus components include PopIt, a tool to make it easy to make and maintain lists of politicians and their basic biographical information; SayIt, which allows you to present transcripts online so that they are viewable, linkable, searchable, and shareable; and WriteIt, which provides an easy way for users to contact people in power by matching users to their representatives using just one piece of information.

EpiCollect

EpiCollect is software that is designed for data collection. For simple projects, EpiCollect allows you to create a project website, design forms for text and photo data collection, load the app into a mobile platform, collect data, and view the data.

For more complex projects, EpiCollect+ allows you to build a project that can do all of the above, collect all types of media (photos, sounds, videos, etc.), download the data, and create forms with logic (e.g., you can skip questions based on user answers).

The software currently supports both Android and iOS.

EpiCollect was developed at Imperial College London and is funded by the Wellcome Trust.

 

What other tools (software, hardware, other) are there that would allow you to roll your own citizen science project? Post your links in the comments below!

 

What’s the weather?

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Pity your local weather forecaster. Rarely praised when correct, often vilified when wrong, weather forecasting is one of the most thankless jobs around.

There’s at least one company that hopes to change all of that. Cumulonimbus Software, a Canadian company led by Jacob Sheehy and Phil Jones, has teamed up with Cliff Mass, a University of Washington atmospheric scientist, to create an app called PressureNet. Designed to make use of the barometer that is already installed in newer Android devices, the goal is to create a high resolution weather data set.

“Our mission is to dramatically improve weather and climate forecasting,” notes the PressureNet website. “We’re using new software tools and taking advantage of the ubiquity of connected atmosphere sensors to build the highest-resolution data collection system for the Earth.”

Very roughly speaking, low-pressure systems are associated with clouds and precipitation and high-pressure systems are associated with dryer weather and clear skies. Pressure measurements are a critical part of the meteorologist’s toolbox for shorter term forecasts, but currently, forecasts are based on relatively few measuring stations, mostly located in urban areas.

“I believe that one of the biggest revolutions in weather forecasting is literally in your hands:  your smartphone,” says Cliff Mass. “Intended to provide elevation information for a variety of apps, these [atmospheric pressure sensors], if collected and quality controlled could provide thousands, if not millions, of pressure observations each day across the nation.”

To contribute to the project, you must have an Android device that comes with a barometer installed.  Currently, this includes the Galaxy Nexus, Galaxy S3, Galaxy Note, Galaxy Note II, Nexus 4, Nexus 10 and Xoom. Then you must install the free PressureNet app, located at Google Play.

Users of the PressureNet system can currently see their raw data and that of regions’ graphed over time. When enough sensors are set to report back to PressureNet, the company plans to provide highly accurate local weather forecasting back to users for a fee.

Photo by Jason Blackeye on Unsplash

BOINC for Android

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BOINC: coming to a phone near you. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

BOINC, which is short for Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, is a piece of software that you can download to your computer. With it, you’re able to donate spare computing time to big data projects, essentially allowing your computer to do your citizen science for you.

Until recently, the software was only available for desktop devices, but the project has now been ported to Android. That means that when you’re not playing Angry Birds, you can donate your smart phone’s processing power to science.

Six projects have already lined up to be on the Android app, including Asteroids@home, Einstein@Home, O-Project@Home, theSkynet POGS, World Community Grid, and Yoyo@Home, which means you can battle things like AIDS as well as bad piggies.

The BOINC for Android app can be found at Google Play, here.