Science Now: “Crowdsourcing is the latest research rage—Kickstarter to raise funding, screen savers that number-crunch, and games to find patterns in data—but most efforts have been confined to the virtual lab of the Internet. In a new twist, researchers have now crowdsourced their experiments by connecting players of a video game to an actual biochemistry lab. The game, called EteRNA, allows players to remotely carry out real experiments to verify their predictions of how RNA molecules fold. The first big result: a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, bearing the names of more than 37,000 authors—only 10 of them professional scientists. “It’s pretty amazing stuff,” says Erik Winfree, a biophysicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
Some see EteRNA as a sign of the future for science, not only for crowdsourcing citizen scientists but also for giving them remote access to a real lab. “Cloud biochemistry,” as some call it, isn’t just inevitable, Winfree says: It’s already here. DNA sequencing, gene expression testing, and many biochemical assays are already outsourced to remote companies, and any “wet lab” experiment that can be automated will be automated, he says. “Then the scientists can focus on the non-boring part of their work.”
EteRNA grew out of an online video game called Foldit. Created in 2008 by a team led by David Baker and Zoran Popović, a molecular biologist and computer scientist, respectively, at the University of Washington, Seattle, Foldit focuses on predicting the shape into which a string of amino acids will fold. By tweaking virtual strings, Foldit players can surpass the accuracy of the fastest computers in the world at predicting the structure of certain proteins. Two members of the Foldit team, Adrien Treuille and Rhiju Das, conceived of EteRNA back in 2009. “The idea was to make a version of Foldit for RNA,” says Treuille, who is now based at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Treuille’s doctoral student Jeehyung Lee developed the needed software, but then Das persuaded them to take it a giant step further: hooking players up directly to a real-world, robot-controlled biochemistry lab. After all, RNA can be synthesized and its folded-up structure determined far more cheaply and rapidly than protein can.
Lee went back to the drawing board, redesigning the game so that it had not only a molecular design interface like Foldit, but also a laboratory interface for designing RNA sequences for synthesis, keeping track of hypotheses for RNA folding rules, and analyzing data to revise those hypotheses. By 2010, Lee had a prototype game ready for testing. Das had the RNA wet lab ready to go at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, where he is now a professor. All they lacked were players.
A message to the Foldit community attracted a few hundred players. Then in early 2011, The New York Times wrote about EteRNA and tens of thousands of players flooded in.
The game comes with a detailed tutorial and a series of puzzles involving known RNA structures. Only after winning 10,000 points do you unlock the ability to join EteRNA’s research team. There the goal is to design RNA sequences that will fold into a target structure. Each week, eight sequences are chosen by vote and sent to Stanford for synthesis and structure determination. The data that come back reveal how well the sequences’ true structures matched their targets. That way, Treuille says, “reality keeps score.” The players use that feedback to tweak a set of hypotheses: design rules for determining how an RNA sequence will fold.
Two years and hundreds of RNA structures later, the players of EteRNA have proven themselves to be a potent research team. Of the 37,000 who played, about 1000 graduated to participating in the lab for the study published today. (EteRNA now has 133,000 players, 4000 of them doing research.) They generated 40 new rules for RNA folding. For example, at the junctions between different parts of the RNA structure—such as between a loop and an arm—the players discovered that it is far more stable if enriched with guanines and cytosines, the strongest bonding of the RNA base pairs. To see how well those rules describe reality, the humans then competed toe to toe against computers in a new series of RNA structure challenges. The researchers distilled the humans’ 40 rules into an algorithm called EteRNA Bot.”
How Government Can Make Open Data Work
Joel Gurin in Information Week: “At the GovLab at New York University, where I am senior adviser, we’re taking a different approach than McKinsey’s to understand the evolving value of government open data: We’re studying open data companies from the ground up. I’m now leading the GovLab’s Open Data 500 project, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, to identify and examine 500 American companies that use government open data as a key business resource.
Our preliminary results show that government open data is fueling companies both large and small, across the country, and in many sectors of the economy, including health, finance, education, energy, and more. But it’s not always easy to use this resource. Companies that use government open data tell us it is often incomplete, inaccurate, or trapped in hard-to-use systems and formats.
It will take a thorough and extended effort to make government data truly useful. Based on what we are hearing and the research I did for my book, here are some of the most important steps the federal government can take, starting now, to make it easier for companies to add economic value to the government’s data.
1. Improve data quality
The Open Data Policy not only directs federal agencies to release more open data; it also requires them to release information about data quality. Agencies will have to begin improving the quality of their data simply to avoid public embarrassment. We can hope and expect that they will do some data cleanup themselves, demand better data from the businesses they regulate, or use creative solutions like turning to crowdsourcing for help, as USAID did to improve geospatial data on its grantees.
2. Keep improving open data resources
The government has steadily made Data.gov, the central repository of federal open data, more accessible and useful, including a significant relaunch last week. To the agency’s credit, the GSA, which administers Data.gov, plans to keep working to make this key website still better. As part of implementing the Open Data Policy, the administration has also set up Project Open Data on GitHub, the world’s largest community for open-source software. These resources will be helpful for anyone working with open data either inside or outside of government. They need to be maintained and continually improved.
3. Pass DATA
The Digital Accountability and Transparency Act would bring transparency to federal government spending at an unprecedented level of detail. The Act has strong bipartisan support. It passed the House with only one dissenting vote and was unanimously approved by a Senate committee, but still needs full Senate approval and the President’s signature to become law. DATA is also supported by technology companies who see it as a source of new open data they can use in their businesses. Congress should move forward and pass DATA as the logical next step in the work that the Obama administration’s Open Data Policy has begun.
4. Reform the Freedom of Information Act
Since it was passed in 1966, the federal Freedom of Information Act has gone through two major revisions, both of which strengthened citizens’ ability to access many kinds of government data. It’s time for another step forward. Current legislative proposals would establish a centralized web portal for all federal FOIA requests, strengthen the FOIA ombudsman’s office, and require agencies to post more high-interest information online before they receive formal requests for it. These changes could make more information from FOIA requests available as open data.
5. Engage stakeholders in a genuine way
Up to now, the government’s release of open data has largely been a one-way affair: Agencies publish datasets that they hope will be useful without consulting the organizations and companies that want to use it. Other countries, including the UK, France, and Mexico, are building in feedback loops from data users to government data providers, and the US should, too. The Open Data Policy calls for agencies to establish points of contact for public feedback. At the GovLab, we hope that the Open Data 500 will help move that process forward. Our research will provide a basis for new, productive dialogue between government agencies and the businesses that rely on them.
6. Keep using federal challenges to encourage innovation
The federal Challenge.gov website applies the best principles of crowdsourcing and collective intelligence. Agencies should use this approach extensively, and should pose challenges using the government’s open data resources to solve business, social, or scientific problems. Other approaches to citizen engagement, including federally sponsored hackathons and the White House Champions of Change program, can play a similar role.
Through the Open Data Policy and other initiatives, the Obama administration has set the right goals. Now it’s time to implement and move toward what US CTO Todd Park calls “data liberation.” Thousands of companies, organizations, and individuals will benefit.”
Use big data and crowdsourcing to detect nuclear proliferation, says DSB
FierceGovernmentIT: “A changing set of counter-nuclear proliferation problems requires a paradigm shift in monitoring that should include big data analytics and crowdsourcing, says a report from the Defense Science Board.
Much has changed since the Cold War when it comes to ensuring that nuclear weapons are subject to international controls, meaning that monitoring in support of treaties covering declared capabilities should be only one part of overall U.S. monitoring efforts, says the board in a January report (.pdf).
There are challenges related to covert operations, such as testing calibrated to fall below detection thresholds, and non-traditional technologies that present ambiguous threat signatures. Knowledge about how to make nuclear weapons is widespread and in the hands of actors who will give the United States or its allies limited or no access….
The report recommends using a slew of technologies including radiation sensors, but also exploitation of digital sources of information.
“Data gathered from the cyber domain establishes a rich and exploitable source for determining activities of individuals, groups and organizations needed to participate in either the procurement or development of a nuclear device,” it says.
Big data analytics could be used to take advantage of the proliferation of potential data sources including commercial satellite imaging, social media and other online sources.
The report notes that the proliferation of readily available commercial satellite imagery has created concerns about the introduction of more noise than genuine signal. “On balance, however, it is the judgment from the task force that more information from remote sensing systems, both commercial and dedicated national assets, is better than less information,” it says.
In fact, the ready availability of commercial imagery should be an impetus of governmental ability to find weak signals “even within the most cluttered and noisy environments.”
Crowdsourcing also holds potential, although the report again notes that nuclear proliferation analysis by non-governmental entities “will constrain the ability of the United States to keep its options open in dealing with potential violations.” The distinction between gathering information and making political judgments “will erode.”
An effort by Georgetown University students (reported in the Washington Post in 2011) to use open source data analyzing the network of tunnels used in China to hide its missile and nuclear arsenal provides a proof-of-concept on how crowdsourcing can be used to augment limited analytical capacity, the report says – despite debate on the students’ work, which concluded that China’s arsenal could be many times larger than conventionally accepted…
For more:
– download the DSB report, “Assessment of Nuclear Monitoring and Verification Technologies” (.pdf)
– read the WaPo article on the Georgetown University crowdsourcing effort”
Citizen roles in civic problem-solving and innovation
Satish Nambisan: “Can citizens be fruitfully engaged in solving civic problems? Recent initiatives in cities such as Boston (Citizens Connect), Chicago (Smart Chicago Collaborative), San Francisco (ImproveSF) and New York (NYC BigApps) indicate that citizens can be involved in not just identifying and reporting civic problems but in conceptualizing, designing and developing, and implementing solutions as well.
The availability of new technologies (e.g. social media) has radically lowered the cost of collaboration and the “distance” between government agencies and the citizens they serve. Further involving citizens — who are often closest to and possess unique knowledge about the problems they face — makes a lot of sense given the increasing complexity of the problems that need to be addressed.
A recent research report that I wrote highlights four distinct roles that citizens can play in civic innovation and problem-solving.
As explorer, citizens can identify and report emerging and existing civic problems. For example, Boston’s Citizen Connect initiative enables citizens to use specially built smartphone apps to report minor and major civic problems (from potholes and graffiti to water/air pollution). Closer to home, both Wisconsin and Minnesota have engaged thousands of citizen volunteers in collecting data on the quality of water in their neighborhood streams, lakes and rivers (the data thus gathered are analyzed by the state pollution control agency). Citizens also can be engaged in data analysis. The N.Y.-based Datakind initiative involves citizen volunteers using their data analysis skills to mine public data in health, education, environment, etc., to identify important civic issues and problems.
As “ideator,”citizens can conceptualize novel solutions to well-defined problems in public services. For example, the federal government’s Challenge.gov initiative employs online contests and competitions to solicit innovative ideas from citizens to solve important civic problems. Such “crowdsourcing” initiatives also have been launched at the county, city and state levels (e.g. Prize2theFuture competition in Birmingham, Ala.; ImproveSF in San Francisco).
As designer, citizens can design and/or develop implementable solutions to well-defined civic problems. For example, as part of initiatives such as NYC Big Apps and Apps for California, citizens have designed mobile apps to address specific issues such as public parking availability, public transport delays, etc. Similarly, the City Repair project in Portland, Ore., focuses on engaging citizens in co-designing and creatively transforming public places into sustainable community-oriented urban spaces.
As diffuser,citizens can play the role of a change agent and directly support the widespread adoption of civic innovations and solutions. For example, in recent years, physicians interacting with peer physicians in dedicated online communities have assisted federal and state government agencies in diffusing health technology innovations such as electronic medical record systems (EMRs).
In the private sector, companies across industries have benefited much from engaging with their customers in innovation. Evidence so far suggests that the benefits from citizen engagement in civic problem-solving are equally tangible, valuable and varied. However, the challenges associated with organizing such citizen co-creation initiatives are also many and imply the need for government agencies to adopt an intentional, well-thought-out approach….”
MIT Crowdsources the Next Great (free) IQ Test
ThePsychReport: “Raven’s Matrices have long been a gold standard for psychologists needing to measure general intelligence. But the good ones, the ones scientists like to use, are too expensive for most research projects.
Christopher Chabris, associate professor of psychology at Union College, and David Engel, postdoctoral associate at MIT Sloan School of Management, think the public can help. They recently launched a campaign to crowdsource “the next great IQ test.” The Matrix Reasoning Challenge, created through MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence with Anita Woolley and Tom Malone, calls on the public to design and submit matrix puzzles – 3×3 grids that asks subjects to complete a pattern by filling in a missing square.
Chabris says they aren’t trying to compete with commercially available tests used for diagnostic or clinical purposes, but rather want to provide a trustworthy and free alternative for scientists. Because these types of puzzles are nonverbal, culturally neutral, and objective, they have wide-ranging applications and are particularly useful when conducting research across various demographics. If this project is successful, a lot more scientists could do a lot more research.
“Researchers typically don’t have that much money,” Chabris said. “They can’t afford pay per use tests. Sometimes they have no research budgets, or if they do, they’re not large enough for that kind of thing. Our real goal is to create something useful for researchers.”
Through the Matrix Reasoning Challenge, Chabris and Engel also hope to better understand how crowdsourcing can be used to problem-solve in social and cognitive sciences.
Social scientists already widely use crowdsourcing sites like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to recruit participants for their studies, but the matrix project is different in that it seeks to tap into the public’s expertise to help solve scientific problems. Scientists in computer science and bioinformatics have been able to harness this expertise to yield some incredible results. Using TopCoder.com, NASA was able to find a more efficient way to deploy solar panels on the International Space Station. Harvard Medical School was able to develop better software for analyzing immune-system genes. With The Matrix Reasoning Challenge, Chabris and Engel are beginning to explore crowdsourcing’s potential in the social sciences.”
Needed: A New Generation of Game Changers to Solve Public Problems
Beth Noveck: “In order to change the way we govern, it is important to train and nurture a new generation of problem solvers who possess the multidisciplinary skills to become effective agents of change. That’s why we at the GovLab have launched The GovLab Academy with the support of the Knight Foundation.
In an effort to help people in their own communities become more effective at developing and implementing creative solutions to compelling challenges, The Gov Lab Academy is offering two new training programs:
1) An online platform with an unbundled and evolving set of topics, modules and instructors on innovations in governance, including themes such as big and open data and crowdsourcing and forthcoming topics on behavioral economics, prizes and challenges, open contracting and performance management for governance;
2) Gov 3.0: A curated and sequenced, 14-week mentoring and training program.
While the online-platform is always freely available, Gov 3.0 begins on January 29, 2014 and we invite you to to participate. Please forward this email to your networks and help us spread the word about the opportunity to participate.
Please consider applying (individuals or teams may apply), if you are:
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an expert in communications, public policy, law, computer science, engineering, business or design who wants to expand your ability to bring about social change;
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a public servant who wants to bring innovation to your job;
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someone with an important idea for positive change but who lacks key skills or resources to realize the vision;
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interested in joining a network of like-minded, purpose-driven individuals across the country; or
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someone who is passionate about using technology to solve public problems.
The program includes live instruction and conversation every Wednesday from 5:00– 6:30 PM EST for 14 weeks starting Jan 29, 2014. You will be able to participate remotely via Google Hangout.
Gov 3.0 will allow you to apply evolving technology to the design and implementation of effective solutions to public interest challenges. It will give you an overview of the most current approaches to smarter governance and help you improve your skills in collaboration, communication, and developing and presenting innovative ideas.
Over 14 weeks, you will develop a project and a plan for its implementation, including a long and short description, a presentation deck, a persuasive video and a project blog. Last term’s projects covered such diverse issues as post-Fukushima food safety, science literacy for high schoolers and prison reform for the elderly. In every case, the goal was to identify realistic strategies for making a difference quickly. You can read the entire Gov 3.0 syllabus here.
The program will include national experts and instructors in technology and governance both as guests and as mentors to help you design your project. Last term’s mentors included current and former officials from the White House and various state, local and international governments, academics from a variety of fields, and prominent philanthropists.
People who complete the program will have the opportunity to apply for a special fellowship to pursue their projects further.
Previously taught only on campus, we are offering Gov 3.0 in beta as an online program. This is not a MOOC. It is a mentoring-intensive coaching experience. To maximize the quality of the experience, enrollment is limited.
Please submit your application by January 22, 2014. Accepted applicants (individuals and teams) will be notified on January 24, 2014. We hope to expand the program in the future so please use the same form to let us know if you would like to be kept informed about future opportunities.”
ShouldWe
ShouldWe is a new online guide to the causes and consequences of the policies which affect our lives. We will be live soon.
Innovation by Competition: How Challenges and Competition Get the Most Out of the Crowd
Innocentive: “Crowdsourcing has become the 21st century’s alternative to problem solving in place of traditional employee-based strategies. It has become the modern solution to provide for needed services, content, and ideas. Crowdsourced ideas are paving the way for today’s organizations to tackle innovation challenges that confront them in today’s competitive global marketplace. To put it all in perspective, crowds used to be thought of as angry mobs. Today, crowds are more like friendly and helpful contributors. What an interesting juxtaposition, eh?
Case studies proving the effectiveness of crowdsourcing to conquer innovation challenge, particularly in the fields of science and engineering abound. Despite this fact that success stories involving crowdsourcing are plentiful, very few firms are really putting its full potential to use. Advances in ALS and AIDS research have both made huge advances thanks to crowdsourcing, just to name a couple.
Biologists at the University of Washington were able to map the structure of an AIDS related virus thanks to the collaboration involved with crowdsourcing. How did they do this? With the help of gamers playing a game designed to help get the information the University of Washington needed. It was a solution that remained unattainable for over a decade until enough top notch scientific minds were expertly probed from around the world with effective crowdsourcing techniques.
Dr. Seward Rutkove discovered an ALS biomarker to accurately measure the progression of the disease in patients through the crowdsourcing tactics utilized in a prize contest by an organization named Prize4Life, who utilized our Challenge Driven Innovation approach to engage the crowd.
The truth is, the concept of crowdsourcing to innovate has been around for centuries. But, with the growing connectedness of the world due to sheer Internet access, the power and ability to effectively crowdsource has increased exponentially. It’s time for corporations to realize this, and stop relying on stale sources of innovation. ..”
Prospects for Online Crowdsourcing of Social Science Research Tasks: A Case Study Using Amazon Mechanical Turk
New paper by Catherine E. Schmitt-Sands and Richard J. Smith: “While the internet has created new opportunities for research, managing the increased complexity of relationships and knowledge also creates challenges. Amazon.com has a Mechanical Turk service that allows people to crowdsource simple tasks for a nominal fee. The online workers may be anywhere in North America or India and range in ability. Social science researchers are only beginning to use this service. While researchers have used crowdsourcing to find research subjects or classify texts, we used Mechanical Turk to conduct a policy scan of local government websites. This article describes the process used to train and ensure quality of the policy scan. It also examines choices in the context of research ethics.”
Crowdsourcing forecasts on science and technology events and innovations
Kurzweil News: “George Mason University launched today, Jan. 10, the largest and most advanced science and technology prediction market in the world: SciCast.
The federally funded research project aims to improve the accuracy of science and technology forecasts. George Mason research assistant professor Charles Twardy is the principal investigator of the project.
SciCast crowdsources forecasts on science and technology events and innovations from aerospace to zoology.
For example, will Amazon use drones for commercial package delivery by the end of 2017? Today, SciCast estimates the chance at slightly more than 50 percent. If you think that is too low, you can estimate a higher chance. SciCast will use your estimate to adjust the combined forecast.
Forecasters can update their forecasts at any time; in the above example, perhaps after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) releases its new guidelines for drones. The continually updated and reshaped information helps both the public and private sectors better monitor developments in a variety of industries. SciCast is a real-time indicator of what participants think is going to happen in the future.
“Combinatorial” prediction market better than simple average
How SciCast works (Credit: George Mason University)
The idea is that collective wisdom from diverse, informed opinions can provide more accurate predictions than individual forecasters, a notion borne out by other crowdsourcing projects. Simply taking an average is almost always better than going with the “best” expert. But in a two-year test on geopolitical questions, the SciCast method did 40 percent better than the simple average.
SciCast uses the first general “combinatorial” prediction market. In a prediction market, forecasters spend points to adjust the group forecast. Significant changes “cost” more — but “pay” more if they turn out to be right. So better forecasters gain more points and therefore more influence, improving the accuracy of the system.
In a combinatorial market like SciCast, forecasts can influence each other. For example, forecasters might have linked cherry production to honeybee populations. Then, if forecasters increase the estimated percentage of honeybee colonies lost this winter, SciCast automatically reduces the estimated 2014 cherry production. This connectivity among questions makes SciCast more sophisticated than other prediction markets.
SciCast topics include agriculture, biology and medicine, chemistry, computational sciences, energy, engineered technologies, global change, information systems, mathematics, physics, science and technology business, social sciences, space sciences and transportation….
Crowdsourcing forecasts on science and technology events and innovations
George Mason University’s just-launched SciCast is largest and most advanced science and technology prediction market in the world
January 10, 2014
Example of SciCast crowdsourced forecast (credit: George Mason University)
George Mason University launched today, Jan. 10, the largest and most advanced science and technology prediction market in the world: SciCast.
The federally funded research project aims to improve the accuracy of science and technology forecasts. George Mason research assistant professor Charles Twardy is the principal investigator of the project.
SciCast crowdsources forecasts on science and technology events and innovations from aerospace to zoology.
For example, will Amazon use drones for commercial package delivery by the end of 2017? Today, SciCast estimates the chance at slightly more than 50 percent. If you think that is too low, you can estimate a higher chance. SciCast will use your estimate to adjust the combined forecast.
Forecasters can update their forecasts at any time; in the above example, perhaps after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) releases its new guidelines for drones. The continually updated and reshaped information helps both the public and private sectors better monitor developments in a variety of industries. SciCast is a real-time indicator of what participants think is going to happen in the future.
“Combinatorial” prediction market better than simple average
How SciCast works (Credit: George Mason University)
The idea is that collective wisdom from diverse, informed opinions can provide more accurate predictions than individual forecasters, a notion borne out by other crowdsourcing projects. Simply taking an average is almost always better than going with the “best” expert. But in a two-year test on geopolitical questions, the SciCast method did 40 percent better than the simple average.
SciCast uses the first general “combinatorial” prediction market. In a prediction market, forecasters spend points to adjust the group forecast. Significant changes “cost” more — but “pay” more if they turn out to be right. So better forecasters gain more points and therefore more influence, improving the accuracy of the system.
In a combinatorial market like SciCast, forecasts can influence each other. For example, forecasters might have linked cherry production to honeybee populations. Then, if forecasters increase the estimated percentage of honeybee colonies lost this winter, SciCast automatically reduces the estimated 2014 cherry production. This connectivity among questions makes SciCast more sophisticated than other prediction markets.
SciCast topics include agriculture, biology and medicine, chemistry, computational sciences, energy, engineered technologies, global change, information systems, mathematics, physics, science and technology business, social sciences, space sciences and transportation.
Seeking futurists to improve forecasts, pose questions
(Credit: George Mason University)
“With so many science and technology questions, there are many niches,” says Twardy, a researcher in the Center of Excellence in Command, Control, Communications, Computing and Intelligence (C4I), based in Mason’s Volgenau School of Engineering.
“We seek scientists, statisticians, engineers, entrepreneurs, policymakers, technical traders, and futurists of all stripes to improve our forecasts, link questions together and pose new questions.”
Forecasters discuss the questions, and that discussion can lead to new, related questions. For example, someone asked,Will Amazon deliver its first package using an unmanned aerial vehicle by Dec. 31, 2017?
An early forecaster suggested that this technology is likely to first be used in a mid-sized town with fewer obstructions or local regulatory issues. Another replied that Amazon is more likely to use robots to deliver packages within a short radius of a conventional delivery vehicle. A third offered information about an FAA report related to the subject.
Any forecaster could then write a question about upcoming FAA rulings, and link that question to the Amazon drones question. Forecasters could then adjust the strength of the link.
“George Mason University has succeeded in launching the world’s largest forecasting tournament for science and technology,” says Jason Matheny, program manager of Forecasting Science and Technology at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, based in Washington, D.C. “SciCast can help the public and private sectors to better understand a range of scientific and technological trends.”
Collaborative but Competitive
More than 1,000 experts and enthusiasts from science and tech-related associations, universities and interest groups preregistered to participate in SciCast. The group is collaborative in spirit but also competitive. Participants are rewarded for accurate predictions by moving up on the site leaderboard, receiving more points to spend influencing subsequent prognostications. Participants can (and should) continually update their predictions as new information is presented.
SciCast has partnered with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and multiple other science and technology professional societies.
Mason members of the SciCast project team include Twardy; Kathryn Laskey, associate director for the C4I and a professor in the Department of Systems Engineering and Operations Research; associate professor of economics Robin Hanson; C4I research professor Tod Levitt; and C4I research assistant professors Anamaria Berea, Kenneth Olson and Wei Sun.
To register for SciCast, visit www.SciCast.org, or for more information, e-mail support@scicast.org. SciCast is open to anyone age 18 or older.”