Citizen Cyberscience Research Articles

Mobile Tools for Community Scientists

Mobile Tools for Community Scientists

A Collaborative Citizen Science Platform for Real-Time Volunteer Computing and Games

Volunteer computing (VC) or distributed computing projects are common in the citizen cyberscience (CCS) community and present extensive opportunities for scientists to make use of computing power donated by volunteers to undertake large-scale scientific computing tasks. VC is generally a noninteractive process for those contributing computing resources to a project, whereas volunteer thinking (VT) or distributed thinking allows volunteers to participate interactively in CCS projects to solve human computation tasks. In this paper, we describe the integration of three tools, the Virtual Atom Smasher (VAS) game developed by CERN, LiveQ, a job distribution middleware, and CitizenGrid, an online platform for hosting and providing computation to CCS projects. This integration demonstrates the combining of VC and VT to help address the scientific and educational goals of games like VAS. This paper introduces the three tools and provides details of the integration process along with further potential usage scenarios for the resulting platform.

Creativity in Citizen Cyberscience

In the context of citizen cyberscience, creativity is generally thought to be positive and should be encouraged. When volunteers think “outside of the box” they bring their own unique perspectives to scientific problems and generate new ideas. In some cases, creativity can even lead to new scientific discoveries. However there are still many unanswered questions about creativity. Is creativity in citizen science just about scientific discovery, or are there other kinds of creative products in citizen cyberscience? How does creativity compare across different kinds of citizen cyberscience, such as volunteer thinking and participatory sensing? In Citizen Cyberlab we explored creativity across four different pilot projects: GeoTag-X, Virtual Atom Smasher, Synthetic Biology, and Extreme Citzien Science. We conducted 96 interviews in total: 86 with volunteers (citizen scientists) and 10 with scientists. Based on our findings, we present several creative products that are a result of active involvement in citizen cyberscience: discussing ideas, suggesting improvements, development of new technologies, gamification, artwork, creative writing, outreach activities, and the development of new research projects. We also discuss factors that encourage creativity, such as having a supportive environment for volunteers and building a sense of community.

Data Analytics in Citizen Cyberscience: Evaluating Participant Learning and Engagement with Analytics

Citizen Cyberscience (CCS) projects are online projects that engage participants with no necessary prior scientific experience in online tasks of very varied types and that contribute to the scientific research in different domains. Many research studies confirm the usefulness of CCS projects to researchers while less has been done to explore their added-value for the participants. Specifically, we are interested to know to what extent CCS projects help participants learn while participating through typically small-sized and very specific tasks.We propose in this work to include another source of quantitative data to the research toolbox usually used to evaluate learning in informal learning contexts as the context of citizen science. This data source is learning analytics that makes use of the already very ubiquitous web analytics and that is heavily used in varied online learning environments. Based on our experience with two CCS pilot projects, we created a framework to help CCS project designers properly implement learning analytics in their project in order to make the full use of these analytics and integrate them with other sources of quantitative data related to the user experience. We apply the proposed framework to explore the interaction between learning and engagement in two pilot CCS projects of different types: volunteer thinking and gaming. We conclude with a number of recommendations to avoid pitfalls and proposals for best practice based on our experience.

Creativity and Learning in Citizen Cyberscience – Lessons from the Citizen Cyberlab Summit

This article summarizes the Citizen Cyberlab (CCL) Summit, which took place at University of Geneva on 17-18th September 2015, and introduces the special issue on “Learning and Creativity in Citizen Science”. As the final event of a 3-year EU FP7 CCL project, the Summit sought to disseminate project results and reflect on the issue of citizen science (CS) as a participatory environment where opportunities for self-development and various types of creativity can arise. A number of interesting themes emerged at the intersection of the work presented by project collaborators and external partners, including the different types of creativity that are evident in CS, the role of the community as the main medium for innovation and participant learning to occur, and the common challenges concerning the design, initiation and management of CS projects.The current issue presents work done during the CCL project, as well as external project contributions, for which the main focus is on learning and creativity in CS. The set of articles addresses diverse aspects of the topic, ranging from empirical research on the phenomena themselves, to tools, platforms and frameworks developed specifically for citizen cyberscience (CCS) with creativity and learning in mind, and distinct CS cases where these phenomena manifest in previously undescribed and unexpected ways. We hope that the issue will be useful to researchers and practitioners who aim to study, evaluate or design for learning and creativity in a range of CCS projects.

Not so passive: engagement and learning in Volunteer Computing projects

This paper focuses on an unexplored dimension of Citizen Science: the educational potential of Volunteer Computing (VC). VC has been one of the most popular forms of Citizen Science, since its beginnings from 1997, when the first VC platforms, such as SETI@home, were created. Participation in VC is based on volunteers donating their idle computer resources to contribute to large scale scientific research. So far this has often been seen as a rather passive form of participation, compared to other online Citizen Science (or citizen cyberscience) projects, since volunteers are not involved in active data collection, data analysis or project definition. In this paper we present our research conducted in 2013-2014 with the BOINC Community “Alliance Francophone”, and demonstrate that part of the volunteers in Distributed Computing research projects are not passive at all. We show that the dynamism of BOINC hugely relies on community-led gamification and that participation may lead to important learning outcomes on most dimensions of our ILICS (Informal Learning in Citizen Science) model. This includes extending one’s scientific interests, ability to find and engage with people who share similar interests, and offering a range of potential learning outcomes, particularly within the fields of (a) computer and Internet literacy, (b) scientific knowledge and literacy, (c) communication: English and social skills. As demonstrated by our recent ILICS survey research (2015), these latest learning effects happen for all kinds of participants and are even stronger for people who have a lower education background, which is an interesting finding for lifelong education policies. Altogether, VC projects engage volunteers emotionally, far beyond a simple use of their computers’ time and power, and may have an educational value. For a minority of very active volunteers, they become real “Opportunity Spaces”, where they can get new friends, skills and experiences, which they could not have found easily elsewhere in their everyday environment.

The ForestWatchers: A Citizen Cyberscience Project for Deforestation Monitoring in the Tropics

Millions of hectares of humid tropical forest are lost each year. Here we introduce the ForestWatchers project, a citizen cyberscience initiative that proposes to involve citizens around the globe in monitoring deforestation. ForestWatchers combines volunteered thinking with participatory sensing. In the project’s volunteered thinking segment, volunteers with their own smartphones, tablets and notebooks, are asked to use a Web interface to review satellite images of forested regions, and confirm whether automatic assignments of forested and deforested regions are correct. In the participatory sensing segment, citizens are invited to contribute with all sorts of data on the status of forested areas, such as pictures, videos or sound records. As the first forest-monitoring program to directly involve lay citizens, the ForestWatchers project aims at providing volunteer-assisted deforestation assessment for countries, regions or communities that do not have the necessary infrastructure or manpower.

Lessons From A Year Of Citizen Science

Emerging global issues such as climate change and biodiversity loss are predicted to become more severe over the course of the 21st century (IPCC AR5, 2014). These issues present a significant challenge both to the scientific community in terms of prediction, quantification and monitoring, and to wider society in terms of adaptation and mitigation.Responding to these challenges is likely to require communication and collaboration on a scale not previously seen in science. The rapidly developing field of citizen science and the growing global network of participatory citizen scientists are likely to be crucial to this response, and may represent a novel model for inclusive international collaboration.The 3rd Citizen Cyberscience Summit (Feb 20th – 22nd, 2014) held in London, UK, brought together a diverse international community of scientists, software developers, industry, policy makers and citizen scientists, to share advances in this field.My own experience lies in molecular ecology and conservation, with citizen science participation as both a hobby and something increasingly incorporated into my research. As a young scientist fascinated and inspired by this emerging field, I hope this gives me the unique perspective bridging both volunteers and academics to evaluate where we are now, and the direction that we might aspire towards as we broaden the horizons of citizen science.The following points are summarized from a year of volunteer participation in citizen science and fruitful observations and discussions at the Citizen Cyberscience Summit 2014 (CCS14).

Getting humans to do quantum optimization - user acquisition, engagement and early results from the citizen cyberscience game Quantum Moves

The game Quantum Moves was designed to pit human players against computer algorithms, combining their solutions into hybrid optimization, to control a scalable quantum computer. In this midstream report, we open our design process and present the constitutive building stages. We present our approach starting with designing a core gameplay around quantum simulations, to putting extra game elements in place to frame, structure and motivate players’ difficult path from internet flâneur to competent science contributors. Among statistical predictors for retention and in-game high scores, the data from our first year suggest that people recruited based on real-world physics interest and via real-world events, but only with an intermediate science education, are more likely to become engaged and skilled contributors. We discuss this relationship between in-world and in-game factors on intrinsic and intrinsic motivation, and its implications for using real live humans to do hybrid optimization via initially simple, but very cognitively complex games.

Participatory Philology: Computational Linguistics and the Future of Historical Language Education

This brief contributes to the proceedings of the Citizen Cyberscience Summit 2014 with a summary of the presentation given by the Open Philology Project on its goals, work, and collaborators. With a focus on the interface between 21st-century philology and citizen science, this paper reviews the data we collect, why we gather that data, and the cohort that we engage for assistance with data production. The paper presents the work of the Historical Languages eLearning Project and the incorporation of pedagogy into resources for participatory philology, as well as briefly reviews a case study of a class at Tufts University that supports the viability of our approach. Above all, we seek to demonstrate the deep similarities of technical infrastructure and research processes between participatory philology and citizen science, despite fundamental differences in a humanistic versus a scientific approach to the subject matter. In so doing, we hope to help lay the foundation for increasing contribution by the humanities to the fields of citizen science and human computation.

Citizen CyberScience ─ New Directions and Opportunities for Human Computation

Citizen CyberScience ─ New Directions and Opportunities for Human Computation

Citizen CyberScience ─ New Directions and Opportunities for Human Computation

Citizen CyberScience ─ New Directions and Opportunities for Human Computation

Managing the Public to Manage Data: Citizen Science and Astronomy

Citizen Cyberscience Projects (CCPs) that recruit members of the public as volunteers to process and produce large datasets promise a great deal of benefits to scientists and science. However, if this promise is to be realised, and citizen science-produced datasets are to be widely used by scientists, it is essential that these datasets win the trust of the scientific community. This task of securing credibility involves, in part, applying standard scientific procedures to clean up datasets formed by volunteer contributions. However, the management of volunteers’ behaviour in terms of how they contribute also plays a significant role in improving both the quality of individual contributions and the overall robustness of the resultant datasets. This can assist CCPs in securing a reputation for producing trustworthy datasets. Through a case study of Galaxy Zoo, a CCP set up to generate datasets based on volunteer classifications of galaxy morphologies, this paper explores how those involved in running the project manage volunteers. In particular, it focuses on how methods for crediting volunteer contributions motivate volunteers to provide higher quality contributions and to behave in a way that better corresponds to statistical assumptions made when combining volunteer contributions into datasets. These methods have made a significant contribution to the success of the project in securing trust in these datasets, which have been well used by other scientists. Implications for practice are then presented for CCPs, providing a list of considerations to guide choices regarding how to credit volunteer contributions to improve the quality and trustworthiness of citizen science-produced datasets.

BOINC service for volunteer cloud computing

Since a couple of years, a team at CERN and partners from the Citizen Cyberscience Centre (CCC) have been working on a project that enables general physics simulation programs to run in a virtual machine on volunteer PCs around the world. The project uses the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) framework. Based on CERNVM and the job management framework Co-Pilot, this project was made available for public beta-testing in August 2011 with Monte Carlo simulations of LHC physics under the name “LHC@home 2.0” and the BOINC project: “Test4Theory”. At the same time, CERN's efforts on Volunteer Computing for LHC machine studies have been intensified; this project has previously been known as LHC@home, and has been running the “Sixtrack” beam dynamics application for the LHC accelerator, using a classic BOINC framework without virtual machines. CERN-IT has set up a BOINC server cluster, and has provided and supported the BOINC infrastructure for both projects. CERN intends to evolve the setup into a generic BOINC application service that will allow scientists and engineers at CERN to profit from volunteer computing. This paper describes the experience with the two different approaches to volunteer computing as well as the status and outlook of a general BOINC service.

Volunteer Clouds and Citizen Cyberscience for LHC Physics

Computing for the LHC, and for HEP more generally, is traditionally viewed as requiring specialized infrastructure and software environments, and therefore not compatible with the recent trend in "volunteer computing", where volunteers supply free processing time on ordinary PCs and laptops via standard Internet connections. In this paper, we demonstrate that with the use of virtual machine technology, at least some standard LHC computing tasks can be tackled with volunteer computing resources. Specifically, by presenting volunteer computing resources to HEP scientists as a "volunteer cloud", essentially identical to a Grid or dedicated cluster from a job submission perspective, LHC simulations can be processed effectively. This article outlines both the technical steps required for such a solution and the implications for LHC computing as well as for LHC public outreach and for participation by scientists from developing regions in LHC research.