Report on the Citizen Cyberscience summit that took place in London Feb 16-18. 

The summit was mainly run by the UCL group led by Muki Hacklay and Francois Grey (head of the citizen cyberscience centre) from CERN. The summit involved a number of participants from around the world (many of them invited by the cyberscience centre) all doing real citizen science. The most impressive talks (which only included a minor ‘visualisation-oriented’ overview from Zooniverse projects such as old weather and planethunters) for me were from:

  1. iSpot (http://www.ispot.org.uk/) – relevant to provenance and trust in the sense that they have algorithms tracking user reports and reputation with regards to spotting different types of wildlife. Also they showed how users’ performance improves as they ‘learn’ to spot new wildlife from experts. Their community includes experts in some areas and non-experts in others and this mix allows them to gather a very broad knowledge base and improve that base over time as the individual expert groups learn from each other.
  2. Instawild (talk by Al Davies – http://www.edgeofexistence.org/instantwild/) – an iphone app that uses the crowd to spot wildlife. The difference from iSpot is that instead of relying on people to collect data, they posted their own ruggedised cameras in Sri Lanka, Kenya etc.. and these cameras trigger based on thermal events (e.g., animal passing by). The more interesting aspect is that they set up a mesh network of these cameras (sometimes posted on trees) to collect, store, and transmit data over satellite links at intervals that maximise battery life (they also use PV cells in some cases). This would be an interesting HAC appliction – humans identifying animals while agents make sure data is being sent at regular intervals and tracking provenance of reports from users or learning from them to know when to turn on and take pictures
  3. Nicolas Maisonneuve/Francois Grey’s work on crowdsourced mapping (http://cybermappr.unige.ch/). Nicolas developed a system similar to Collabmap in that he asked users to annotate buildings (only pinpoint them) using satellite imagery from UNOSAT. They noted that different ‘groups’ (coalitions) of people would generate better results due to their complementarities in terms of the kind of tasks they performed on the same areas. They are also working on Cybermappr – looking at geotagging pictures from the Libya conflict using the crowd. This includes a verification process very similar to Collabmap’s but much harder as it is a much more complex task to identify features in the Lybian war photos that look the same.
  4. dontflush.me – a website setup by Leif Percifield. He has set up sensors in the sewers of various cities to detect the level of sewage in the storage systems they have. These tend to overflow whenver there is heavy rain and are as a result, dumped in the rivers (e.g., Hudson). His system notifies users when public waste overflows during rainy days. Coupling that with feedback systems in the home, he aims to control how often people flush toilets, use washing machines, or the shower. This is quite relevant to the kind of work we are doing in the energy domain and I had a chat with him about that and he mentioned working with the guys in the University of Washington group in creating ambient interfaces for such notifications.
  5. Tom Igoe’s presentation on his work at NYU (he’s an Arts professor) where he’s been working with students to create various artifacts to sense, provide feedback, and cause behaviour change. He works a lot with Arduino-based systems and trains his students to use them (he hosted a workshop and gave away some boards). Some of the interesting products included a plant that would let you know when it was sick, a music-based feedback therapy tool to help retrain a person’s arm. Again, this work relates to energy feedback and how to integrate sensors/interfaces into our environment.
  6. Quake Catcher (Taiwan) – on the work done by the US team in combining QCN (desktop-based vibration sensors) with east Asia’s high-performance computing approach to detecting earthquakes.
  7. Radiation-watch.org – they are developing portable radiation sensors connected to their phone) that people can use to detect radiation wherever they go. They reported on the Fukushima radiation map.
  8. Vitorio Loreto’s talk on the EU Everyaware project where they’ve built an ESP-like platform called Xtribe that allows you to setup games/crowdsourcing tasks that people can login to play.
  9. Scistarter (http://scistarter.com/) – a website that promotes cyberscience projects – including the Heartmap challenge. They go round doing activities with school kids to get them involved in such projects as well. We made sure we advertised hearcrowd to the head of Scistarter (she turned out to be from Philadelphia!).

 Also, it was interesting to see Muki Haclay’s work with the London21 social enterprise where they did a bunch of deployments of air quality sensors in Putney, noise sensors in Deptford. They are doing this work within their ‘Extreme Citizen science’ group at UCL where they are keen to involve normal citizens (with no technical knowledge) in citizen science projects with a view to influencing policy.    In the coming week I’ll post a list of links to interesting citizen science related sites I recorded.