Tag: Citizen Science

Technology and Research Mendeley Masterclass

Alice Bonasio
©Tom Atkinson 2013 - www.r3digital.co.uk
©Tom Atkinson 2013

Last month we saw another edition of the global extravaganza that is Social Media Week. This time around there were over 1000 events and 25,000 attendees in 8 cities around the globe. The theme for this year was “Open & Connected” which is pretty much a perfect fit for the Mendeley philosophy. So we thought it would be great to host an event in the London SMW Hub about how technology is changing the way we conduct and fund research, how researchers interact, discover content and share their findings, as well as how the non-academic public can get involved and make a real different through citizen science initiatives.

Our Masterclass was streamed live and proved to be one of the most popular events of the week, with hundreds of people tuning in and sending their own questions.

Mendeley Co-founder and President Jan Reichelt kicked off the series of lightning presentations by explaining how Mendeley can help researchers organise their papers, but also how it went far beyond that. “Research is an inherently social activity, and Mendeley is an environment starting with productivity going over into collaboration, and that also crucially captures the social context going on around that research.”

Rachel Greene from JoVE challenged researchers to “stop reading and start watching,” explaining how the majority of the time scientists failed to accurately replicate the findings of key studies. She believes that technologies such as the one used in their peer-reviewed Journal of Visualized Experiments are much more suited for that purpose than traditional print, and can therefore dramatically increase reproducibility and the pace of scientific discovery.

“In the past everything was recorded on paper, but current science is very digital,” says IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg from Elsevier’s Article of the Future project, which aims to improve scientific communication in all its rich facets. “All the records are digital, all the capturing of scientific data is digital, and the communication of that information of course is also digital. However the traditional publishers have not yet adapted to that, what they usually do is flatten the multidimensional, rich research that an author has created into a two-dimensional paper of text and images.” He gave insight into some tantalizing possibilities, including the ability to run variations of some experiments – in computer science for example – within the parameters of the article itself, making it a living, evolving piece of collaborative research.

Nicolai Humphreys from The Lancet told of how the meaning of the journal’s name came from the fact that “A lancet can be an arched window to let light in and can also be a sharp surgical instrument to cut out the dross” and upon founding the journal in 1823 Thomas Wakley stated his intention that the publication should serve both those functions. Fast-forward nearly 200 years and Nicolai is part of the team that is using technology to cut out the dross and make academic publishing more dynamic and cutting edge.

Emma Cooper described the journey that took their digital amusements company Team Cooper to developing a Facebook game in conjunction with The Sainsbury Laboratory to help harness the brainpower of citizen scientists to tackle Ash Dieback disease. Quoting Dr Dan MacLean, who approached them about building the game with their data, “humans are smart and humorous, and we love games.” The key to the success of Fraxinus is the human ability to recognise patterns, and this proved really addictive with players (over 38,000 in the first month), who spend 20 minutes on average playing the game, where the average tends to be around 5-10 minutes.

That is what Robert Simpson from citizen science web portal Zooniverse calls “cognitive surplus,” which describes the vast amount of time that we collectively spend on activities such as watching TV. “The human race spends 16 years every hour playing Angry Birds every hour. There’s a lot of brainpower out there and what we try to do is take that brainpower and make it more useful to researchers.” The team at Zooniverse works with researchers to design sites that take their data and presents it into a format that will let the crowd help them to achieve their objectives. In the case of Snapshot Serengeti, for example, this meant classifying the millions of pictures taken over 2 years by camera traps in Tanzania to provide new insight into wildlife dynamics.

“These days with modern technology Citizen Science is becoming a fresh new hot subject in science,” says Margaret Gold of Citizen Cyberlab, which is leveraging the web, mobile phones and other tools and platforms to enable crowd-sourced scientific research. “We give people across the globe an interactive means to either help with the collection of data or the processing of data, pattern recognition and so forth, and all this makes a very genuine contribution towards science.”

Dr Rayna Stamboliyska, a Research Fellow and Digital Content Coordinator at the Centre for Research and Interdisciplinarity in Paris, believes that technology can be used to bring research into primary schools, and that “we can change the world many kids at a time.” In these programs, PhD fellows work with school children to develop research projects, leveraging and incorporating various technologies and social media. “This not only engages them in the STEM curricula at a young age, but it’s a really gender neutral policy, so we’re addressing the problem of having so few women in science.”

But ground-breaking research often comes across the stumbling block that is lack of funding, and this is where Liz Wald from Indiegogo believes that crowdfunding can help scientists. “it’s really about getting rid of gatekeepers, knocking down barriers and taking ideas right to the crowd,” she said as she went through a few of the projects that were crowdfunded through Indiegogo, such as Kite Patch (a patch that lets people avoid mosquito bites) and uBiome (where you sent off swabs of your bacteria to them so that they could let you know more about yourself and also help the wider project to sequence the Microbiome). The message was that people will not only fund cool and useful gadgets, but all forms of science as long as you tell a good story.

If you missed it on the day don’t worry, all the presentations are on the Mendeley YouTube Channel, so you can watch them any time and let us know what you think! There are also some cool pictures of the day available on our Flickr page, we had a great time and thanks again to all our speakers and community!

 

 

 

How is Technology Changing Research? Let’s Find Out!

Alice Bonasio

SMW London badge v2

Social Media Week London will soon be upon us and Mendeley is really excited to be hosting a Masterclass in the heart of Covent Garden. This year’s SMW theme is “Open and Connected” and  that’s literally what Mendeley is all about. So we thought we’d bring together a few like-minded people to talk about how social media and technology are changing the way we research and what this means not only for the academic community, but for everybody.

Research is not about a “walled garden” any more. It’s global, open and collaborative (the fact that Mendeley just reached 2.5 million users proves that) If you’re a student, have a professional interest in science or academia, are one of the millions of people who have contributed in some way to a citizen science project or thought about supporting research through crowdfunding, then you’re part of this story. And if you aren’t yet, then chances are that you soon will be. People want to participate in science, creating communities around interesting projects and helping to advance the pace of discovery in the process, and now they can even do this by playing Facebook games.

The dynamic format of the event will have 9 high-profile international speakers presenting their ideas in 5-minute PechaKucha-style presentations followed by a 45-minute open discussion between the panellists and the audience (both in the venue and online) mediated by Nicolai Humphreys, Web Editor of the Lancet. We have a very impressive cross-section line-up, and they’ll explore, from a variety of angles, how technology and social media are enabling scientific research and making science more open for everyone. We will look at how games can leverage the brainpower of millions of citizen scientists, how crowdfunding initiatives have helped raise funds for finding new cures for cancer, and how global collaborative platforms are helping to bring together researchers to help solve some of the biggest problems facing us today.

The space in the venue is limited to only few guests and VIP pass holders, but we’ll be streaming everything live, so wherever you are in the world you can watch the sessions and send in your comments.

So if you have a question (whether it’s for on of the panelists or a general issue about technology and research you’d like to explore) get in touch via Twitter using the hashtag #smwSciTech or send an email to alice.bonasio@mendeley.com and we’ll try our best to include it!

See you there!

Event Details

Social Science Masterclass: How Technology is Changing Research

Thursday 26th September 2013

11:00am to 1:00pm

Covent Garden, London

Speakers:

Jan Reichelt, President and Co-Founder at Mendeley, dubbed the “Facebook for Scientists” – a collaboration platform with 2.5 million users worldwide that also offers researchers workflow and content management tools to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery. In April 2013 Mendeley was acquired by Elsevier, one of the world’s largest scientific publishers

Nicolai Humphreys Web Editor, The Lancet, one the world’s best known, oldest and most respected medical journals, founded in 1823 and published by Elsevier since 1991

Rachel Greene – Director of Marketing at JoVE (Journal of Visualized Experiments) the first peer-reviewed and internationally recognised Scientific Journal that uses video content

IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg Senior Vice President Journal and Content Technology at Elsevier . He heads the Article of the Future project, which is an initiative that looks at how the traditional paper/pdf based article will evolve to accommodate the wealth of multimedia content that researchers will increasingly rely upon to build scholarly conversation

Margaret Gold Director and Co-Founder of the Mobile Collective,which includes projects such as Citizen Cyberlab, looking to build tools and platforms for citizen science as well as collaborative environments and software tools that stimulate creative learning.

Emma Cooper, Business Development Director at Team Cooper, the developers of Facebook game Fraxinus which harnesses the power of citizen science to find a cure for ash dieback disease

Liz Wald, Head of International at Indiegogo, the largest crowdfunding platform on the web which has successfully enabled scientific research via projects such as uBiome and iCancer which raised funds as well as awareness through their highly successful campaigns.

Rayna Stamboliyska, Board Member of the Open Knowledge Foundation France, working at the Centre for Research and Interdisciplinarity in Paris which focuses on open digital tools for science and has prototyped a platform for citizen science projects in synthetic biology.

Robert Simpson, Researcher and Developer at Zooniverse  (a platform that connects citizen scientists with projects they can contribute to)

 

Top Tips for Crowdfunding Your Research

Alice Bonasio

 

Crowdfunding for Research

We had a great response to our last blog post about crowdfunding for research, with lots of people joining our Mendeley Crowdfunding Group and emailing questions and comments.

So yesterday I joined a live Google Hangout with the folks from Indiegogo to try and answer some of those questions and also give some general guidelines about how to start a campaign to raise research funds through crowdfunding.

Breanna DiGiammarino, Educational Vertical Lead at Indiegogo, advised researchers to think about what audience their research speaks to, but also pointed out that you can often be surprised at how many people are interested in what might seem a very niche subject. Crowdfunding, she explains, reaches a wide global audience, and that reach can be much bigger than you expect.Read More »

Research Taps Into the Crowd

Alice Bonasio

Photograph by FlyingPete at Morguefile

There’s no denying that securing funding is a vital part of a researcher’s job. But although it has never been exactly easy to apply for and get money for scientific research, the on-going global economic crisis made things even more difficult, especially for early career researchers. Faced with cuts, universities and funding bodies have less money to distribute, and might opt for safer bets in established scientists and less experimental approaches and projects.

Maybe this is why we have seen a rise in the trend of crowdfunding research, where scientists – both in and around traditional institutions – have appealed to the wisdom (and pockets) of the crowd. And the crowd, it seems, is really eager to take a more active role in research, not only funding it but also participating through citizen science projects.

Microryza, a crowdfunding website launched in 2012, raised over $200,000 for about 80 projects (they operate an all-or-nothing model where backers only get charged if the campaign goal is reached). Those projects include creating an open synthetic biology lab in the cloud, Tracking Magellanic Penguins, an investigation into why jokes are funny, and research into whether nanobots can be used to detect and target cancer cells.

Indiegogo, the largest crowdfunding platform on the web, hosted some very successful projects such as uBiome (a citizen science project that aims to better understand the dozens of health conditions related to the bacteria in your body) and iCancer (a campaign that raised over £2 million to fund research into a potential treatment for neuroendocrine cancer)

At Mendeley, we thought that our community of nearly 2.5 million researchers would be interested in the new possibilities this type of funding could bring, so we started a Crowdfunding group and asked Indiegogo to advise any researchers who wanted to start their own campaigns into what they should do to maximise their chances of success. This is why on Tuesday the 27th August Alice Atkinson-Bonasio from Mendeley will join the experts at Indiegogo for one of their weekly sessions, which will be streamed live on YouTube.

This is where we’ll be talking about some of the most common questions researchers have around crowdfunding, such as what opportunities, there are, what successful campaigns have done, what research has been funded and what best practice is for reaching your target.

If you have any questions or comments about crowdfunding research, please join the Mendeley group, send a tweet to @alicebonasio using the hashtag #MendeleyCrowdfunding or post it on the comments here. You can also find us on both the Indiegogo and Mendeley Facebook pages.

Facebook Game Uses Crowdsourcing to Tackle Ash Die Back Disease

Alice Bonasio

Fraxinus

Britain’s estimated 80 million ash trees are under threat, with scientists fearing that the Chalara fungus – known ash ash die back disease – could prove as deadly to the UK’s woodlands as Dutch elm disease was in the 1970s, killing millions of trees. In Denmark, the impact of ash die back was devastating, with between 60 and 90 per cent of all its ash trees being lost.

But there is hope… In the unexpected form of a Facebook game. Researchers sequenced the DNA from many infected trees and re-assembled them as closely as possible so they can identify variations that determine how susceptible the trees are to this disease. The human brain is uniquely adept at seeing patterns more quickly and adeptly than computers, and it’s that ability that the developers of Fraxinus (from the ash tree’s Latin name, Fraxinus Excelsior) are harnessing. The hope is that by identifying those patters through gameplay, players will provide potentially vital clues as to how the disease works on a genetic level.

“Every organism, whether human, tree of fungus has a genome virtually identical to the rest of the species but with tiny variations,” the game’s introductory screen explains. Players are challenged to manipulate and match up sequences of coloured leaves representing strings of genetic information from ash trees (both vulnerable ones from the UK and resistant strains taken from Denmark) and the Chalara fungus. Scientists will then look to use that data to cross-breed trees resistant to the disease.

Matching sequences closely earns high scores, and lets players claim patterns for their collection. However, these patterns can be stolen from under their noses by other players who use the same pattern to achieve a higher score. The competitive element adds to the addictiveness of the game and keeps players engaged for longer in order to build up and maintain their collections. The advantage for the database is that each pattern theft also serves to make the data even more accurate.

The game was envisaged by Dr Dan MacLean, head of bioinformatics at The Sainsbury Laboratory in Norfolk and designed by Bafta-nominated game developers Team Cooper. The unique challenge, say the developers, was to design a game that was engaging and addictive in its own right, but also managed to produce valid scientific results. These results are now being gathered and will be published as an open source supply for scientific research.

Dr MacLean told BBC News: ‘how we get the most out of it is if people want to come back to it and play it with their friends. That it’s for a good cause is a bonus.’

Apart from the lovely feeling of helping to save millions of trees, those who top the game’s leaderboard will actually be credited on articles as having helped with the research. Lead Developer for Team Cooper Russell Stearman said that it was a unique move for players to both contribute meaningful data to the Open Ash Die Back Project and be officially recognised in scientific papers.

Whiling away the hours on Facebook might not be everyone’s idea of advancing science and protecting the environment, but citizen science projects have used gamification to tap into the power of crowds with great success. The scientists behind this project believe that crowdsourcing this social media hive mentality could bring forward the production of disease-resistant trees by over 40 years, which is certainly an impressive claim. But what are the wider implications for science, and does this mean that social media gaming is coming of age? Let us know what you think!

 

 

 

 

 

Science Citizens Unite!

Alice Bonasio

Citizen Science

 

There’s been a lot of buzz around “Citizen Science” lately, so it’s only fair to ask whether the hype is really justified or if it’s more of a gimmick or passing fad. Taking some time to look at the projects that have already harnessed the power of the masses to advance scientific research, however, it’s difficult not to get excited.

Citizen Science, as the name suggests, is where ordinary citizens volunteer their brainpower, time, and other resources such as spare computer power, to help with research projects. From asking people to count squirrels in their backyard to encouraging you to build your own laser harp, there literally is something out there to suit everyone’s abilities, resources, and disposition. Getting involved can mean something as simple as donating some spare computer time; ClimatePrediction.net, for example, aims to produce predictions of the Earth’s climate up to 2300 by asking users to download and run a model program when their computers are on but not being used to full capacity.

For those looking to get more involved, however, there is the opportunity to hunt for stellar clusters in the Andromeda Galaxy, identify and measure the orbits of Near Earth Objects , or help researchers at Berkeley in their Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence through the SETI@home project.

Closer to home you can view and classify pictures from the hundreds of camera traps set throughout the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, monitor the status of bat populations, measure the evolution of tropical storms, or help survey scallop numbers in the New York Bight by analysing undersea images captured by a robot submarine named Dora. Even the humanities need not feel neglected, as nearly 800,000 people signed up so far to help the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford increase access to their music collections by transcribing information from digitized sheet music. Sites like Zooniverse aggregate the largest and most popular projects, and you only need to register once to participate in as many as you like.

But while a lot of these projects only require people to view, interpret and process images, some actually ask you to actively solve puzzles, effectively turning scientific questions into games.

Ribonucleic acid (RNA) is a substance used by our cells to translate genetic information from our DNA. Folding and shape-shifting allows RNA to control cells in a predictable way, and this has huge medical and biological implications that are still to be discovered. This is where EteRNA come in: It’s a game where you design RNAs, which are then scored according to how well they fold. The best examples are added to the first large-scale library of synthetic RNA designs in the world. Similarly, Phylo is a game where participants align DNA sequences by shifting puzzle pieces as a way of achieving Multiple Sequence Alignments. A sequence alignment is a way of arranging the sequences of DNA to identify regions of similarity. From such an alignment, biologists can trace the source of certain genetic diseases. Traditionally, alignment algorithms use computationally complex heuristics to align the sequences but this is prohibitively expensive; by taking data pre-aligned by a heuristic algorithm and abstracting it into manipulating patterns consisting of coloured shapes, the game harnesses the natural human ability to recognize patterns and solve visual problems efficiently.

This is something that research institutions and charities such as Cancer Research UK are keen to capitalize upon. They are teaming up with games designers and computer programmers from tech giants such as Amazon, Facebook and Google to find a way to gamify the search for DNA mutations which lead to cancer. The data needs to be analysed by eye, as computers cannot identify the subtle differences which give the clue as to what the genetic causes of cancers might be. They are aiming to have the project up and running this summer

So it might be that this democratization of science, opening it up to ordinary citizen participation from all over the world, could aid the discovery of a cure for cancer, uncover the secrets of the universe, and help us advance knowledge in all areas of human knowledge. What do you think about it? Have you been involved in such a project or considered crowdsourcing as a way to advance your research? Or have you participated in these or any other projects as a citizen scientist? We’d love to hear your experiences, so do leave a comment or join the conversation on Twitter and Facebook.