NASA Launches New Citizen Science Website

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 

NASASolveRobert McNamara  at Commons Lab:
 
NASASolve debuted last month as a one-stop-shop for prizes and challenges that are seeking contributions from people like you. Don’t worry you need not be a rocket scientist to apply. The general public is encouraged to contribute to solving a variety of challenges facing NASA in reaching its mission goals. From hunting asteroids to re-designing Balance Mass for the Mars Lander, there are multitudes of ways for you to be a part of the nation’s space program.
Crowdsourcing the public for innovative solutions is something that NASA has been engaged in since 2005.  But as NASA’s chief technologist points out, “NASASolve is a great way for members of the public and other citizen scientists to see all NASA prizes and challenges in one location.”  The new site hopes to build on past successes like the Astronaut Glove Challenge, the ISS Longeron Challenge and the Zero Robotics Video Challenge. “Challenges are one tool to tap the top talent and best ideas. Partnering with the community to get ideas and solutions is important for NASA moving forward,” says Jennifer Gustetic, Program Executive of NASA Prizes and Challenges.
In order to encourage more active public participation, millions of dollars and scholarships have been set aside to reward those whose ideas and solutions succeed in taking on NASA’s challenges. If you want to get involved, visit NASASolve for more information and the current list of challenges waiting for solutions….

Open Access Button

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About the Open Access Button: “The key functions of the Open Access Button are finding free research, making more research available and also advocacy. Here’s how each works.

Finding free papers

Research published in journals that require you to pay to read can sometimes be accessed free in other places. These other copies are often very similar to the published version, but may lack nice formatting or be a version prior to peer review. These copies can be found in research repositories, on authors websites and many other places because they’re archived. To find these versions we identify the paper a user needs and effectively search on Google Scholar and CORE to find these copies and link them to the users.

Making more research, or information about papers available

If a free copy isn’t available we aim to make one. This is not a simple task and so we have to use a few different innovative strategies. First, we email the author of the research and ask them to make a copy of the research available – once they do this we’ll send it to everyone who needs it. Second, we create pages for each paper needed which, if shared, viewed, and linked to an author could see and provide their paper on. Third, we’re building ways to find associated information about a paper such as the facts contained, comments from people who’ve read it, related information and lay summaries.

Advocacy

Unfortunately the Open Access Button can only do so much, and isn’t a perfect or long term solution to this problem. The data and stories collected by the Button are used to help make the changes required to really solve this issue. We also support campaigns and grassroots advocates with this at openaccessbutton.org/action..”

Google trial lets you chat with doctors when you search for symptoms

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jon Fingas at Engadget: “Searching the web for symptoms of illness can be dangerous — you could identify a real condition, but you also risk scaring yourself for no reason through a misdiagnosis. Google might have a solution that puts your mind at ease, though. The company has confirmed to Engadget that it’s testing a Helpouts-style feature which offers video chats with doctors when you search for symptoms. While there aren’t many details of how this works in practice, the search card mentions that Google is covering the costs of any chats during the trial phase. You’ll likely have to pay for virtual appointments if and when the service is ever ready for prime time, then. That’s not ideal, but it could be much cheaper than seeing a physician in person….”

Journey tracking app will use cyclist data to make cities safer for bikes

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “Most cities were never designed to cater for the huge numbers of bikes seen on their roads every day, and as the number of cyclists grows, so do the fatality statistics thanks to limited investment in safe cycle paths. While Berlin already crowdsources bikers’ favorite cycle routes and maps them through the Dynamic Connections platform, a new app called WeCycle lets cyclists track their journeys, pooling their data to create heat maps for city planners.
Created by the UK’s TravelAI transport startup, WeCycle taps into the current consumer trend for quantifying every aspect of life, including journey times. By downloading the free iOS app, London cyclists can seamlessly create stats each time they get on their bike. They app runs in the background and uses the device’s accelerometer to smartly distinguish walking or running from cycling. They can then see how far they’ve traveled, how fast they cycle and every route they’ve taken. Additionally, the app also tracks bus and car travel.
Anyone that downloads the app agrees that their data can be anonymously sent to TravelAI, creating an accurate and real-time information resource. It aims to create tools such as heat maps and behavior monitoring for cities and local authorities to learn more about how citizens are using roads to better inform their transport policies.
WeCycle follows in the footsteps of similar apps such as Germany’s Radwende and the Toronto Cycling App — both released this year — in taking a popular trend and turning into data that could help make cities a safer place to cycle….Website: www.travelai.info“

Citizen Science: The Law and Ethics of Public Access to Medical Big Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New Paper by Sharona Hoffman: “Patient-related medical information is becoming increasingly available on the Internet, spurred by government open data policies and private sector data sharing initiatives. Websites such as HealthData.gov, GenBank, and PatientsLikeMe allow members of the public to access a wealth of health information. As the medical information terrain quickly changes, the legal system must not lag behind. This Article provides a base on which to build a coherent data policy. It canvasses emergent data troves and wrestles with their legal and ethical ramifications.
Publicly accessible medical data have the potential to yield numerous benefits, including scientific discoveries, cost savings, the development of patient support tools, healthcare quality improvement, greater government transparency, public education, and positive changes in healthcare policy. At the same time, the availability of electronic personal health information that can be mined by any Internet user raises concerns related to privacy, discrimination, erroneous research findings, and litigation. This Article analyzes the benefits and risks of health data sharing and proposes balanced legislative, regulatory, and policy modifications to guide data disclosure and use.”

Agency Liability Stemming from Citizen-Generated Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Bailey Smith for The Wilson Center’s Science and Technology Innovation Program: “New ways to gather data are on the rise. One of these ways is through citizen science. According to a new paper by Bailey Smith, JD, federal agencies can feel confident about using citizen science for a few reasons. First, the legal system provides significant protection from liability through the Federal Torts Claim Act (FTCA) and Administrative Procedures Act (APA). Second, training and technological innovation has made it easier for the non-scientist to collect high quality data.”

An Air-Quality Monitor You Take with You

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

MIT Technology Review: “A startup is building a wearable air-quality monitor using a sensing technology that can cheaply detect the presence of chemicals around you in real time. By reporting the information its sensors gather to an app on your smartphone, the technology could help people with respiratory conditions and those who live in highly polluted areas keep tabs on exposure.
Berkeley, California-based Chemisense also plans to crowdsource data from users to show places around town where certain compounds are identified.
Initially, the company plans to sell a $150 wristband geared toward kids with asthma—of which there are nearly 7 million in the U.S., according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention— to help them identify places and pollutants that tend to provoke attacks,  and track their exposure to air pollution over time. The company hopes people with other respiratory conditions, and those who are just concerned about air pollution, will be interested, too.
In the U.S., air quality is monitored at thousands of stations across the country; maps and forecasts can be viewed online. But these monitors offer accurate readings only in their location.
Chemisense has not yet made its initial product, but it expects it will be a wristband using polymers treated with charged nanoparticles of carbon such that the polymers swell in the presence of certain chemical vapors, changing the resistance of a circuit.”

This Exercise App Tracks Trends on How We Move In Different Cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mark Byrnes at CityLab: “An app designed to encourage exercise can also tell us a lot about the way different cities get from point A to B.
The app, called Human, runs in the background of your iPhone, automatically detecting activities like walking, cycling, running, and motorized transport. The point is to encourage you to exercise for at least 30 minutes a day.
Almost a year since Human launched (last August), its developers have released stunning visualization of all that movement: 7.5 million miles traveled by their app users so far.
On their site, you can look into the mobility data inside 30 different cities. Once you click on one, you’ll be greeted with a pie chart that shows the distribution of activity within that city lined up against a pie chart that shows the international average.
In the case of Amsterdam, its transportation clichés are verified. App users in the bike-loving city use two wheels way more than they use four. And they walk about as much as anywhere else:

Human then shows the paths traveled by their users. When it comes to Amsterdam, the results look almost exactly like the city’s entire street grid, no matter what physical activity is being shown:

How Crowdsourced Astrophotographs on the Web Are Revolutionizing Astronomy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Emerging Technology From the arXiv: “Astrophotography is currently undergoing a revolution thanks to the increased availability of high quality digital cameras and the software available to process the pictures after they have been taken.
Since photographs of the night sky are almost always better with long exposures that capture more light, this processing usually involves combining several images of the same part of the sky to produce one with a much longer effective exposure.
That’s all straightforward if you’ve taken the pictures yourself with the same gear under the same circumstances. But astronomers want to do better.
“The astrophotography group on Flickr alone has over 68,000 images,” say Dustin Lang at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and a couple of pals. These and other images represent a vast source of untapped data for astronomers.
The problem is that it’s hard to combine images accurately when little is known about how they were taken. Astronomers take great care to use imaging equipment in which the pixels produce a signal that is proportional to the number of photons that hit.
But the same cannot be said of the digital cameras widely used by amateurs. All kinds of processes can end up influencing the final image.
So any algorithm that combines them has to cope with these variations. “We want to do this without having to infer the (possibly highly nonlinear) processing that has been applied to each individual image, each of which has been wrecked in its own loving way by its creator,” say Lang and co.
Now, these guys say they’ve cracked it. They’ve developed a system that automatically combines images from the same part of the sky to increase the effective exposure time of the resulting picture. And they say the combined images can rival those from much professional telescopes.
They’ve tested this approach by downloading images of two well-known astrophysical objects: the NGC 5907 Galaxy and the colliding pair of galaxies—Messier 51a and 51b.
For NGC 5907, they ended up with 4,000 images from Flickr, 1,000 from Bing and 100 from Google. They used an online system called astrometry.net that automatically aligns and registers images of the night sky and then combined the images using their new algorithm, which they call Enhance.
The results are impressive. They say that the combined images of NGC5907 (bottom three images) show some of the same faint features that revealed a single image taken over 11 hours of exposure using a 50 cm telescope (the top left image). All the images reveal the same kind of fine detail such as a faint stellar stream around the galaxy.
The combined image for the M51 galaxies is just as impressive, taking only 40 minutes to produce on a single processor. It reveals extended structures around both galaxies, which astronomers know to be debris from their gravitational interaction as they collide.
Lang and co say these faint features are hugely important because they allow astronomers to measure the age, mass ratios, and orbital configurations of the galaxies involved. Interestingly, many of these faint features are not visible in any of the input images taken from the Web. They emerge only once images have been combined.
One potential problem with algorithms like this is that they need to perform well as the number of images they combine increases. It’s no good if they grind to a halt as soon as a substantial amount of data becomes available.
On this score, Lang and co say astronomers can rest easy. The performance of their new Enhance algorithm scales linearly with the number of images it has to combine. That means it should perform well on large datasets.
The bottom line is that this kind of crowd-sourced astronomy has the potential to make a big impact, given that the resulting images rival those from large telescopes.
And it could also be used for historical images, say Lang and co. The Harvard Plate Archives, for example, contain half a million images dating back to the 1880s. These were all taken using different emulsions, with different exposures and developed using different processes. So the plates all have different responses to light, making them hard to compare.
That’s exactly the problem that Lang and co have solved for digital images on the Web. So it’s not hard to imagine how they could easily combine the data from the Harvard archives as well….”
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1406.1528 : Towards building a Crowd-Sourced Sky Map

Every citizen a scientist? An EU project tries to change the face of research

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Project News from the European Commission:  “SOCIENTIZE builds on the concept of ‘Citizen Science’, which sees thousands of volunteers, teachers, researchers and developers put together their skills, time and resources to advance scientific research. Thanks to open source tools developed under the project, participants can help scientists collect data – which will then be analysed by professional researchers – or even perform tasks that require human cognition or intelligence like image classification or analysis.

Every citizen can be a scientist
The project helps usher in new advances in everything from astronomy to social science.
‘One breakthrough is our increased capacity to reproduce, analyse and understand complex issues thanks to the engagement of large groups of volunteers,’ says Mr Fermin Serrano Sanz, researcher at the University of Zaragoza and Project Coordinator of SOCIENTIZE. ‘And everyone can be a neuron in our digitally-enabled brain.’
But how can ordinary citizens help with such extraordinary science? The key, says Mr Serrano Sanz, is in harnessing the efforts of thousands of volunteers to collect and classify data. ‘We are already gathering huge amounts of user-generated data from the participants using their mobile phones and surrounding knowledge,’ he says.
For example, the experiment ‘SavingEnergy@Home’ asks users to submit data about the temperatures in their homes and neighbourhoods in order to build up a clearer picture of temperatures in cities across the EU, while in Spain, GripeNet.es asks citizens to report when they catch the flu in order to monitor outbreaks and predict possible epidemics.
Many Hands Make Light Work
But citizens can also help analyse data. Even the most advanced computers are not very good at recognising things like sun spots or cells, whereas people can tell the difference between living and dying cells very easily, given only a short training.
The SOCIENTIZE projects ‘Sun4All’ and ‘Cell Spotting’ ask volunteers to label images of solar activity and cancer cells from an application on their phone or computer. With Cell Spotting, for instance, participants can observe cell cultures being studied with a microscope in order to determine their state and the effectiveness of medicines. Analysing this data would take years and cost hundreds of thousands of euros if left to a small team of scientists – but with thousands of volunteers helping the effort, researchers can make important breakthroughs quickly and more cheaply than ever before.
But in addition to bringing citizens closer to science, SOCIENTIZE also brings science closer to citizens. On 12-14 June, the project participated in the SONAR festival with ‘A Collective Music Experiment’ (CME). ‘Two hundred people joined professional DJs and created musical patterns using a web tool; participants shared their creations and re-used other parts in real time. The activity in the festival also included a live show of RdeRumba and Mercadal playing amateurs rhythms’ Mr. Serrano Sanz explains.
The experiment – which will be presented in a mini-documentary to raise awareness about citizen science – is expected to help understand other innovation processes observed in emergent social, technological, economic or political transformations. ‘This kind of event brings together a really diverse set of participants. The diversity does not only enrich the data; it improves the dialogue between professionals and volunteers. As a result, we see some new and innovative approaches to research.’
The EUR 0.7 million project brings together 6 partners from 4 countries: Spain (University of Zaragoza and TECNARA), Portugal (Museu da Ciência-Coimbra, MUSC ; Universidade de Coimbra),  Austria (Zentrum für Soziale Innovation) and Brazil (Universidade Federal de Campina Grande, UFCG).
SOCIENTIZE will end in October 2104 after bringing together 12000 citizens in different phases of research activities for 24 months.”