Volunteering for a better world: harnessing technology and willing citizens
Using the strengths of distributed computing, researchers and citizens can participate in a new way of doing science
By Danielle Venton, CERN, Switzerland
We live in a time when nearly all information is available to nearly all people everywhere. We are entering an age where all types of people can also contribute to many types of information. A bus driver in rural Romania may be part of a biomedical research project; a banker in Los Angeles might moonlight as a collaborator in an astronomy project. This new movement, called “citizen science,” allows non-specialist volunteers to participate in global research. The projects are diverse: from backyard insect counts (the Firefly Citizen Science Project) and galaxy classification (GalaxyZoo), to studies of malaria (MalariaControl.net) or prime number searches (PrimeGrid).
The marriage of distributed computing with citizen science represents a potential revolution: it gives scientists access to more resources and makes “cybercitizens” active participants in the research process. With a few mouse clicks and 20 minutes to spare, a person can aid scores of projects. They can assist in as many or as few projects as they like, and their involvement does not damage the performance of their own computer. Considering the average desktop is idle about 80% of the time, its spare computing cycles represent a large resource. After downloading the needed software, a computer’s spare analytical power is harvested to work on small pieces of a large problem, sent from the project’s server. Once completed, results are sent back to the project. Sharing large tasks in this way can reduce the time needed to solve complicated problems.
Where to start?
Many of these projects use the common software platform BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing). The BOINC site points to nearly 50 projects covering climate change, astrophysics, earthquake monitoring, epidemiology, the search for extraterrestrial life and more. BOINC’s volunteers– about a third of a million people – donate an average of 4,540.83 TeraFLOPS in 24 hours. Other citizen science portals include World Community Grid and EDGeS. World Community Grid, sponsored by IBM, has nearly half a million members and promotes humanitarian and medical applications such as Nutritious Rice for the World and FightAIDS@home.
The EDGeS project, or Enabling Desktop Grids for e-Science, links publicly funded service grids, such as Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE), to BOINC-based volunteer or “desktop” grids. This means that researchers can put their service grid applications on volunteer grid systems, and volunteers can contribute to applications on service grids.
Human computing: distributed thinking
An intriguing sub-variety of volunteer projects call for “volunteer thinking.” These projects share out tasks that require human intelligence for accurate processing. For example, the human brain is able to recognize galaxy shape and type more quickly and accurately than any computer. Thus, Galaxy Zoo volunteers are working to manually classify images of the near quarter million galaxies that have been collected through the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
This work helps astronomers understand how galaxies form. Similarly, a UNOSAT (the United Nations Institute for Training and Research Operational Satellite Applications Program) project called AfricaMap. The purpose of this project is to produce updated georeferenced data. It will rely on volunteers to mark roads, bridges, rivers, fields
and such using satellite images of rural Africa, thus updating old maps and creating new maps for previously
unmapped areas. Accurate maps will help aid workers to reach remote areas and scientists to track the progress of climate change. This project, and others like it, are being collected under the umbrella of the Citizen Cyberscience Centre, a partnership between the University of Geneva, the UN Institute for Training and Research, and CERN (the
European Organization for Nuclear Research). Interest in contributing? Visit Africa@home, BOINC, EDGeS or World Community Grid.
