Don’t Miss the Technology and Research Mendeley Masterclass at Social Media Week!

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This Thursday the 26th September, Mendeley’s Co-founder Jan Reichelt will get together with 8 other innovators from the Open Knowledge Foundation, Zooniverse, Elsevier, Indiegogo, Team Cooper, The Lancet, JoVE and the Mobile Collective to discuss the many ways that technology can change, facilitate and improve things for researchers everywhere.

From “The Article of the Future” and the power of crowdfunding to enable research, to videos that enhance reproducibility and games that harness the power of crowds to solve some of the world’s most difficult scientific challenges, there’s certainly going to be a lot of food for thought…

We’re going to be right at the heart of all the activity in Social Media HQ which will also host events by the likes of Facebook, Nokia, Pinterest, Twitter and Google to name but a few. Spaces at the venue are extremely limited and you have to hold a VIP Pass to attend, but you can watch the event for free and live from wherever you are by following the live streaming link.

If you have any questions, comments or thoughts you’d like to put to the panel, do get in touch! You can leave a comment here, email me on alice.bonasio@mendeley.com  or Tweet using the hashtag #smwSciTech

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

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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)

 

Facebook Game Uses Crowdsourcing to Tackle Ash Die Back Disease

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!

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.

Announcing the Mendeley Haiku Contest #mendeleyhaiku

‘Lost in citation, APA or MLA, Shown with Mendeley’

We asked our Mendeley Advisors to submit a haiku on their Advisor application and the material that was submitted was so impressive we thought we would open up submissions to the wider Mendeley community. If you’re a poet (whether you know it or not), send us a tweet including #mendeleyhaiku or post on our Facebook page and we’ll add it to our collection. To make it a little more fun, we’ll pick a winner and feature their haiku on this blog, twitter, and our Facebook page. We’ll also give the best scholarly poet to enter our competition the item of their choice from our Cafepress page, and a premium account for ten of their friends who aren’t using Mendeley yet.

Scoring will be based on the number of retweets or likes of the post. Haiku should follow the traditional form and must include the #mendeleyhaiku hashtag or be posted to our Facebook page to enter.

DEADLINE is February 14th, so get your creative juices flowing!