How Technology is Crowd-Sourcing the Fight Against Hunger

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Beth Noveck at Media Planet: “There is more than enough food produced to feed everyone alive today. Yet access to nutritious food is a challenge everywhere and depends on getting every citizen involved, not just large organizations. Technology is helping to democratize and distribute the job of tackling the problem of hunger in America and around the world.

Real-time research

One of the hardest problems is the difficulty of gaining real-time insight into food prices and shortages. Enter technology. We no longer have to rely on professional inspectors slowly collecting information face-to-face. The UN World Food Programme, which provides food assistance to 80 million people each year, together with Nielsen is conducting mobile phone surveys in 15 countries (with plans to expand to 30), asking people by voice and text about what they are eating. Formerly blank maps are now filled in with information provided quickly and directly by the most affected people, making it easy to prioritize the allocation of resources.

Technology helps the information flow in both directions, enabling those in need to reach out, but also to become more effective at helping themselves. The Indian Ministry of Agriculture, in collaboration with Reuters Market Light, provides information services in nine Indian languages to 1.4 million registered farmers in 50,000 villages across 17 Indian states via text and voice messages.

“In the United States, 40 percent of the food produced here is wasted, and yet 1 in 4 American children (and 1 in 6 adults) remain food insecure…”

Data to the people

New open data laws and policies that encourage more transparent publication of public information complement data collection and dissemination technologies such as phones and tablets. About 70 countries and hundreds of regions and cities have adopted open data policies, which guarantee that the information these public institutions collect be available for free use by the public. As a result, there are millions of open datasets now online on websites such as the Humanitarian Data Exchange, which hosts 4,000 datasets such as country-by-country stats on food prices and undernourishment around the world.

Companies are compiling and sharing data to combat food insecurity, too. Anyone can dig into the data on the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition platform, a data collaborative where 300 private and public partners are sharing information.

Importantly, this vast quantity of open data is available to anyone, not only to governments. As a result, large and small entrepreneurs are able to create new apps and programs to combat food insecurity, such as Plantwise, which uses government data to offer a knowledge bank and run “plant clinics” that help farmers lose less of what they grow to pests. Google uses open government data to show people the location of farmers markets near their homes.

Students, too, can learn to play a role. For the second summer in a row, the Governance Lab at New York University, in partnership with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), mounted a two-week open data summer camp for 40 middle and high school students. The next generation of problem solvers is learning new data science skills by working on food safety and other projects using USDA open data.

Enhancing connection

Ultimately, technology enables greater communication and collaboration among the public, social service organizations, restaurants, farmers and other food producers who must work together to avoid food crises. The European Food Safety Authority in Italy has begun exploring how to use internet-based collaboration (often called citizen science or crowdsourcing) to get more people involved in food and feed risk assessment.

In the United States, 40 percent of the food produced here is wasted, and yet 1 in 4 American children (and 1 in 6 adults) remain food insecure, according to the Rockefeller Foundation. Copia, a San Francisco based smartphone app facilitates donations and deliveries of those with excess food in six cities in the Bay Area. Zero Percent in Chicago similarly attacks the distribution problem by connecting restaurants to charities to donate their excess food. Full Harvest is a tech platform that facilitates the selling of surplus produce that otherwise would not have a market.

Mobilizing the world

Prize-backed challenges create the incentives for more people to collaborate online and get involved in the fight against hunger….(More)”

The Wisdom of the Crowd is what science really needs

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Science/Disrupt: “In a world where technology allows for global collaboration, and in a time when we’re finally championing diversity of thought, there are few barriers to getting the right people together to work on some of our most pressing problems. Governments and research labs are attempting to apply this mentality to science through what is known as ‘Citizen Science’ – research conducted in part by the public (amateur scientists) in partnership with the professionals.

The concept of Citizen Science is brilliant: moving science forward, faster, by utilising the wisdom and volume of the crowd. …

But Citizen Science goes beyond working directly with people with specific data to share. Zooniverse – the home of Citizen Science online – lists hundreds of projects which anyone can get involved with to help advance science. From mapping the galaxy and looking for comets, to seeking outAustralian wildlife and helping computers understand animal faces, the projects span across many subjects.

But when you dig deeper into the tasks being asked of these CitizenScientists, you find that – really – it’s a simple data capture activity. There’s no skill involved other than engaging your eyes to see and fingers to click and type. It’s not the wisdom of the crowd which is being tapped into.

You could argue that people are interested purely in being a part of important research – which of course is true for many – but it misses the point that scientists are simply missing out on a great resource of intellect at their fingertips.

There has been a rise of crowdsourced solutions over the last few years. rLoopis an organisation formed over Reddit to propose a Hyperloop transportation capsule; Techfugees is a Global community of technologists who team up to propose and build solutions to problems facing the increasing numbers of refugees around the world;  and XPRIZE is an open competition offering winning teams large sums of money and support to solve the global problems they select each year.

The difference between crowdsourcing and Citizen Science is that in the former, a high value is placed on ideas. There’s a general understanding that‘two minds are better than one’ and that by empowering a larger, more diverse pool of people to engage with important and purposeful work, a better solution will be found faster.

With Citizen Science, the mood is that of the public only being capable of playing hide and seek with pictures and completing menial, time consuming work that the scientists are simply too busy to do. …(More)”

Crowdsourcing: It Matters Who the Crowd Are

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Alexis Comber, Peter Mooney, Ross S. Purves, Duccio Rocchini, and Ariane Walz: “Volunteered geographical information (VGI) and citizen science have become important sources data for much scientific research. In the domain of land cover, crowdsourcing can provide a high temporal resolution data to support different analyses of landscape processes. However, the scientists may have little control over what gets recorded by the crowd, providing a potential source of error and uncertainty. This study compared analyses of crowdsourced land cover data that were contributed by different groups, based on nationality (labelled Gondor and Non-Gondor) and on domain experience (labelled Expert and Non-Expert). The analyses used a geographically weighted model to generate maps of land cover and compared the maps generated by the different groups. The results highlight the differences between the maps how specific land cover classes were under- and over-estimated. As crowdsourced data and citizen science are increasingly used to replace data collected under the designed experiment, this paper highlights the importance of considering between group variations and their impacts on the results of analyses. Critically, differences in the way that landscape features are conceptualised by different groups of contributors need to be considered when using crowdsourced data in formal scientific analyses. The discussion considers the potential for variation in crowdsourced data, the relativist nature of land cover and suggests a number of areas for future research. The key finding is that the veracity of citizen science data is not the critical issue per se. Rather, it is important to consider the impacts of differences in the semantics, affordances and functions associated with landscape features held by different groups of crowdsourced data contributors….(More)”

Citizen Scientist

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Mary Ellen Hannibal: “…Here is a wide-ranging adventure in becoming a citizen scientist by an award-winning writer and environmental thought leader. As Mary Ellen Hannibal wades into tide pools, follows hawks, and scours mountains to collect data on threatened species, she discovers the power of a heroic cast of volunteers—and the makings of what may be our last, best hope in slowing an unprecedented mass extinction.

Digging deeply, Hannibal traces today’s tech-enabled citizen science movement to its roots: the centuries-long tradition of amateur observation by writers and naturalists. Prompted by her novelist father’s sudden death, she also examines her own past—and discovers a family legacy of looking closely at the world. With unbending zeal for protecting the planet, she then turns her gaze to the wealth of species left to fight for.

Combining original reporting, meticulous research, and memoir in impassioned prose, Citizen Scientist is a literary event, a blueprint for action, and the story of how one woman rescued herself from an odyssey of loss—with a new kind of science….(More)”

Expanding citizen science models to enhance open innovation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 in the Conversation: “Over the years, citizen scientists have provided vital data and contributed in invaluable ways to various scientific quests. But they’re typically relegated to helping traditional scientists complete tasks the pros don’t have the time or resources to deal with on their own. Citizens are asked to count wildlife, for instance, or classify photos that are of interest to the lead researchers.

This type of top-down engagement has consigned citizen science to the fringes, where it fills a manpower gap but not much more. As a result, its full value has not been realized. Marginalizing the citizen scientists and their potential contribution is a grave mistake – it limits how far we can go in science and the speed and scope of discovery.

Instead, by harnessing globalization’s increased interconnectivity, citizen science should become an integral part of open innovation. Science agendas can be set by citizens, data can be open, and open-source software and hardware can be shared to assist in the scientific process. And as the model proves itself, it can be expanded even further, into nonscience realms.

…

 

The time is right for citizen science to join forces with open innovation. This is a concept that describes partnering with other people and sharing ideas to come up with something new. The assumption is that more can be achieved when boundaries are lowered and resources – including ideas, data, designs and software and hardware – are opened and made freely available.

Open innovation is collaborative, distributed, cumulative and it develops over time. Citizen science can be a critical element here because its professional-amateurs can become another significant source of data, standards and best practices that could further the work of scientific and lay communities.

Globalization has spurred on this trend through the ubiquity of internet and wireless connections, affordable devices to collect data (such as cameras, smartphones, smart sensors, wearable technologies), and the ability to easily connect with others. Increased access to people, information and ideas points the way to unlock new synergies, new relationships and new forms of collaboration that transcend boundaries. And individuals can focus their attention and spend their time on anything they want.

We are seeing this emerge in what has been termed the “solution economy” – where citizens find fixes to challenges that are traditionally managed by government.

Consider the issue of accessibility. Passage of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act aimed to improve accessibility issues in the U.S. But more than two decades later, individuals with disabilities are still dealing with substantial mobility issues in public spaces – due to street conditions, cracked or nonexistent sidewalks, missing curb cuts, obstructions or only portions of a building being accessible. These all can create physical and emotional challenges for the disabled.

To help deal with this issue, several individual solution seekers have merged citizen science, open innovation and open sourcing to create mobile and web applications that provide information about navigating city streets. For instance, Jason DaSilva, a filmmaker with multiple sclerosis, developed AXS Map – a free online and mobile app powered by Google Places API. It crowdsources information from people across the country about wheelchair accessibility in cities nationwide….

Perhaps the most pressing limitation of scaling up the citizen science model is issues with reliability. While many of these projects have been proven reliable, others have fallen short.

For instance, crowdsourced damage assessments from satellite images following 2013’s Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines faced challenges. But according to aid agencies, remote damage assessments by citizen scientists had a devastatingly low accuracy of 36 percent. They overrepresented “destroyed” structures by 134 percent….(More)”

Better research through video games

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Simon Parkin at the New Yorker:”… it occurred to Szantner and Revaz that the tremendous amount of time and energy that people put into games could be co-opted in the name of human progress. That year, they founded Massively Multiplayer Online Science, a company that pairs game makers with scientists.

This past March, the first fruits of their conversation in Geneva appeared in EVE Online, a complex science-fiction game set in a galaxy composed of tens of thousands of stars and planets, and inhabited by half a million or so people from across the Internet, who explore and do battle daily. EVE was launched in 2003 by C.C.P., a studio based in Reykjavík, but players have only recently begun to contribute to scientific research. Their task is to assist with the Human Protein Atlas (H.P.A.), a Swedish-run effort to catalogue proteins and the genes that encode them, in both normal tissue and cancerous tumors. “Humans are, by evolution, very good at quickly recognizing patterns,” Emma Lundberg, the director of the H.P.A.’s Subcellular Atlas, a database of high-resolution images of fluorescently dyed cells, told me. “This is what we exploit in the game.”

The work, dubbed Project Discovery, fits snugly into EVE Online’s universe. At any point, players can take a break from their dogfighting, trading, and political machinations to play a simple game within the game, finding commonalities and differences between some thirteen million microscope images. In each one, the cell’s innards have been color-coded—blue for the nucleus (the cell’s brain), red for microtubules (the cell’s scaffolding), and green for anywhere that a protein has been detected. After completing a tutorial, players tag the image using a list of twenty-nine options, including “nucleus,” “cytoplasm,” and “mitochondria.” When enough players reach a consensus on a single image, it is marked as “solved” and handed off to the scientists at the H.P.A. “In terms of the pattern recognition and classification, it resembles what we are doing as researchers,” Lundberg said. “But the game interface is, of course, much cooler than our laboratory information-management system. I would love to work in-game only.”

Rather than presenting the project as a worthy extracurricular activity, EVE Online’s designers have cast it as an extension of the game’s broader fiction. Players work for the Sisters of EVE, a religious humanitarian-aid organization, which rewards their efforts with virtual currency. This can be used to purchase items in the game, including a unique set of armor designed by one of the C.C.P.’s artists, Andrei Cristea. (The armor is available only to players who participate in Project Discovery, and therefore, like a rare Coco Chanel frock, is desirable as much for its scarcity as for its design.) Insuring that the mini-game be thought of as more than a short-term novelty or diversion was an issue that Linzi Campbell, Project Discovery’s lead designer, considered carefully. “The hardest challenge has been turning the image-analysis process into a game that is strong enough to motivate the player to continue playing,” Campbell told me. “The fun comes from the feeling of mastery.”

Evidently, her efforts were successful. On the game’s first day of release, there were four hundred thousand submissions from players. According to C.C.P., some people have been so caught up in the task that they have played for fifteen hours without interruption. “EVE players turned out to be a perfect crowd for this type of citizen science,” Lundberg said. She anticipates that the first phase of the project will be completed this summer. If the work meets this target, players will be presented with more advanced images and tasks, such as the classification of protein patterns in complex tumor-tissue samples. Eventually, their efforts could aid in the development of new cancer drugs….(More)”

Finding Pathways to More Equitable and Meaningful Public-Scientist Partnerships

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Daniela Soleri et al in Citizen Science: Theory and Practice: “For many, citizen science is exciting because of the possibility for more diverse, equitable partnerships in scientific research with outcomes considered meaningful and useful by all, including public participants. This was the focus of a symposium we organized at the 2015 conference of the Citizen Science Association. Here we synthesize points made by symposium participants and our own reflections.

Professional science has a participation problem that is part of a larger equity problem in society. Inequity in science has negative consequences including a failure to address the needs and goals arising from diverse human and social experiences, for example, lack of attention to issues such as environmental contamination that disproportionately impact under-represented populations, and a failure to recognize the pervasive effects of structural racism. Inequity also encourages mistrust of science and scientists. A perception that science is practiced for the sole benefit of dominant social groups is reinforced when investigations of urgent community concerns such as hydraulic fracturing are questioned as being biased endeavors.

Defined broadly, citizen science can challenge and change this inequity and mistrust, but only if it reflects the diversity of publics, and if it doesn’t reinforce existing inequities in science and society. Key will be the way that science is portrayed: Acknowledging the presence of bias in all scientific research and the tools available for minimizing this, and demonstrating the utility of science for local problem solving and policy change. Symposium participants called for reflexive research, mutual learning, and other methods for supporting more equitable engagement in practice and in the activities of the Citizen Science Association…(More)”.

Citizen Generated Data In Practice

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

DataShift: “No-one can communicate the importance of citizen-generated data better than those who are actually working with it. At DataShift, we want to highlight the civil society organisations who have told us about the tangible results they have achieved through innovative approaches to harnessing data from citizens.

Each essay profiles the objectives, challenges and targets of an organisation using data generated by citizens to achieve their goals. We hope that the essays in this collection can help more people feel more confident about asking questions of the data that affects their lives, and taking a hands-on approach to creating it. (More)”

ESSAYS

VOZDATA

People and collaborative technology are helping to redefine Argentina’s fourthestate

SCIENCE FOR CHANGE KOSOVO (SFCK)

Collaborative citizen science to tackleKosovo’s air pollution problem and simultaneously engage with a politically disenfranchised generation of young people

Design principles for engaging and retaining virtual citizen scientists

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Dara M. Wald, Justin Longo and A. R. Dobell at Conservation Biology: “Citizen science initiatives encourage volunteer participants to collect and interpret data and contribute to formal scientific projects. The growth of virtual citizen science (VCS), facilitated through websites and mobile applications since the mid-2000s, has been driven by a combination of software innovations and mobile technologies, growing scientific data flows without commensurate increases in resources to handle them, and the desire of internet-connected participants to contribute to collective outputs. However, the increasing availability of internet-based activities requires individual VCS projects to compete for the attention of volunteers and promote their long-term retention. We examined program and platform design principles that might allow VCS initiatives to compete more effectively for volunteers, increase productivity of project participants, and retain contributors over time. We surveyed key personnel engaged in managing a sample of VCS projects to identify the principles and practices they pursued for these purposes and led a team in a heuristic evaluation of volunteer engagement, website or application usability, and participant retention. We received 40 completed survey responses (33% response rate) and completed a heuristic evaluation of 20 VCS program sites. The majority of the VCS programs focused on scientific outcomes, whereas the educational and social benefits of program participation, variables that are consistently ranked as important for volunteer engagement and retention, were incidental. Evaluators indicated usability, across most of the VCS program sites, was higher and less variable than the ratings for participant engagement and retention. In the context of growing competition for the attention of internet volunteers, increased attention to the motivations of virtual citizen scientists may help VCS programs sustain the necessary engagement and retention of their volunteers….(More)”

Can An Online Game Help Create A Better Test For TB?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Esther Landhuis at NPR: “Though it’s the world’s top infectious killer, tuberculosis is surprisingly tricky to diagnose. Scientists think that video gamers can help them create a better diagnostic test.

An online puzzle released Monday will see whether the researchers are right. Players of a Web-based game called EteRNA will try to design a sensor molecule that could potentially make diagnosing TB as easy as taking a home pregnancy test. The TB puzzle marks the launch of “EteRNA Medicine.”

The idea of rallying gamers to fight TB arose as two young Stanford University professors chatted over dinner at a conference last May. Rhiju Das, a biochemist who helped create EteRNA, told bioinformatician Purvesh Khatri about the game, which challenges nonexperts to design RNA molecules that fold into target shapes.

RNA molecules play key roles in biology and disease. Some brain disorders can be traced to problems with RNA folding. Viruses such as H1N1 flu and HIV depend on RNA elements to replicate and infect cells.

Das wants to “fight fire with fire” — that is, to disrupt the RNA involved in a disease or virus by crafting new tools that are themselves made of RNA molecules. EteRNA players learn RNA design principles with each puzzle they solve.

Khatri was intrigued by the notion of engaging the public to solve problems. His lab develops novel diagnostics using publicly available data sets. The team had just published a paper on a set of genes that could help diagnose sepsis and had other papers under review on influenza and TB.

In an “Aha!” moment during their dinner chat, Khatri says, he and Das realized “how awesome it would be to sequentially merge our two approaches — to use public data to find a diagnostic marker for a disease, and then use the public’s help to develop the test.”

TB seemed opportune as it has a simple diagnostic signature — a set of three human genes that turn up or down predictably after TB infection. When checked across gene data on thousands of blood samples from 14 groups of people around the globe, the behavior of the three-gene set readily identified people with active TB, distinguishing them from individuals who had latent TB or other diseases.

Those findings, published in February, have gotten serious attention — not only from curious patients and doctors but also from humanitarian groups eager to help bring a better TB test to market. It can currently take several tests to tell whether a person has active TB, including a chest X-ray and sputum test. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has started sending data to help the Stanford team validate a test based on the newly identified TB gene signature, says study leader Khatri, who works at the university’s Center for Biomedical Informatics Research….(More)”