Amateur Experts
Trisha Gura
A freelance writer in Boston, Massachusetts
Introduction to Biomedical Informatics, June 10, 2013
R00945045 賴家欽 NTU BEBI
B98902049 陳琤 NTU CSIE D00945020 張乃文 NTU BEBI
Citizen Science
11April 2013, Vol. 496, Nature, 259
Outline
• Creative Concept
• Projects/ Institutes/ Application fields
• Powerful strength in numbers
• Real Examples/ photos
• Challenges
• Conclusion
Creative Concept
• Citizen Science
"public par+cipa+on in scien+fic research.”
PPSR
• Amateur experts
Involving members of the public can help science projects—but researchers should consider what they want to achieve.
Citizen science
"the systema+c collec+on and analysis of data;
development of technology; tes+ng of natural
phenomena; and the dissemina+on of these ac+vi+es by researchers on a primarily voca+onal basis".
"public par+cipa+on in scien+fic research."
Amateur experts (1)
• Equipped with smartphones, computers and do-‐it-‐yourself (DIY) sampling kits, lay
volunteers are twee+ng about snowfall, ques+ng for comets and measuring the microbes in their guts.
• part of a growing group of ‘ci+zen scien+sts’
• Recrui+ng non-‐scien+sts who help to analyze or collect data as part of a researcher-‐led
project.
Amateur experts (2)
• It offers a means of doing substan+al,
thoughKul public outreach, and of tackling otherwise intractable, laborious or costly research problems.
• recrui+ng non-‐scien+sts comes with
complica+ons, including finding the right
technical tools and partners to organize and execute projects with poten+ally thousands of data collectors.
Projects/
Institutes/
Application field
It is difficult to measure the growth in ci+zen science accurately, in part because many ventures overlap with science-‐educa+on
efforts, but projects are definitely becoming more common.
Institute Projects Members Application
field Academic
Ci+zen Science Alliance
1 in 2007 Has hosted Over 20 now Launch 10/
200 proposals
Planet Hunter
Nature’s Notbook Video Game Old Weather
Sacred tree/log
Trap/animals
Christopher LintoZ
Jake Weltzin
Jus+n Halberda Philip Borhan
Jerome Lewis
Muki Haklay
Astrology
Ecology phenology Psychology Climate science Social
anthropology Geographic
Oxford U
Arizona U
Johns Hopkins U Met office
Hadley Center in Exeter
U College London UCL SciStarter Over 450
*boast Public
Ci+zen Science
Central 162 Rick Bonney* Ornithology Cornell U NSF, Na+onal
Science Founda+on
Paleo Quest SharkFinder
Andrea Wiggins
Jason Osborne Social Science
Paleontology New Mexico U
Christopher LintoZ
• An astronomer at the University of Oxford, UK,
• and chair of the Ci'zen Science Alliance, which hosts projects and
advises researchers
• Planet Hunter
The Ci+zen Science Alliance (CSA)
• began with one project in 2007 and has now hosted more than 20
• WHAT IS THE CITIZEN SCIENCE ALLIANCE?
– The CSA is a collabora+on of scien+sts, sojware
developers and educators who collec+vely develop, manage and u+lize internet-‐based ci+zen science projects in order to further science itself, and the public understanding of both science and of the scien+fic process. These projects use the +me,
abili+es and energies of a distributed community of ci+zen scien+sts who are our collaborators.
hZp://www.ci+zensciencealliance.org/
SciStarter
hZp://www.scistarter.com/
Ci+zen Science Central
• Cofounded by Rick Bonney, an
ornithologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who in 1995 coined the term ciNzen science — lists 162 projects.
• What is Ci+zen Science and PPSR?
– The growing field of public par+cipa+on in scien+fic research (PPSR) includes ci+zen science, volunteer monitoring, and other forms of organized research in which
members of the public engage in the
process of scien+fic inves+ga+ons: asking ques+ons, collec+ng data, and/or
interpre+ng results.
hZp://www.birds.cornell.edu/citscitoolkit
Jake Weltzin
• An ecologist at the
University of Arizona in Tucson
• is execu+ve director of the USA Na+onal
Phenology Network, which runs a project
called Nature’s Notebook.
• Ci+zen scien+sts track how climate affects the +ming of life-‐cycle events in plants and animals.
“This is a whole new way of doing science,” says Weltzin.
“Being able to think about and collect data at a con+nental scale.” 13
Application fields
• Ci+zen Science
• Astronomy 天文
• Ornithology 鳥類
• Phenology(Ecology, Climate) 現象(生態氣候)
• Psychology 心理
• Social anthropology 社會人類學
• Paleontology 古生物學
Powerful Strength in numbers Reach Out
人多好辦事
Ci+zen science can help researchers to address previously insoluble problems.
Ci+zen science can also educate and engage.
Jus+n Halberda
• He originally thought that he would need to gather data from tens of thousands of people of all ages over the course of years, a feat that would be financially and
logis+cally impossible for one research team with a limited budget.
• Asking volunteers to play a sort of video game that
measures number sense the ability to es+mate how many items there are in a collec+on without actually coun+ng
them.
A psychologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, wanted to study how cognition develops as people age.
“no scien)st would have been able to generate these data”, says Halberda.
Philip Brohan
• A climate scien+st at the Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter, UK.
• his colleagues build up data sets using weather records from
nineteenth-‐century ships.
• Old Weather
Na+onal Science Founda+on(NSF)
• requests a descrip+on of a project’s “broader impact” for many of its grants, including early-‐career development awards. Ci+zen
science is a great way to meet your broader-‐impact requirements, says Weltzin.
• It can also get the public involved in research that can inform environmental or governmental policy.
hZp://www.nsf.gov/
Real examples/ Photos
Case I.
• Ci+zens helped to collect data on noise levels near a scrapyard in the London district of
DepKord.
• Ci+zen scien+sts showed that the opera+on violated noise limits, and the UK Environment Agency revoked the scrapyard’s license.
Case II. Jerome Lewis
• Members of communi+es in the Congo Basin are set to aid land and animal conserva+on.
• A social anthropologist at University College London (UCL), was working with pygmy
hunter-‐gatherers in Rwanda and other areas in the region when they told him about
poachers killing animals and loggers
destroying natural resources, such as sacred trees.
Case II. Jerome Lewis
“If we find a way to go to the extremes of ci+zen science, we can do all kinds of really
interes+ng stuff.”
Haklay
Case III.
• Deal with poachers will launch this April. Data such as the loca+ons of snares will be shared with policy-‐makers to aZempt to reduce the killing of endangered animals.
• As an added feature, the phones come with a thermoelectric baZery charger, which can
convert heat from campfires to electricity.
Case IV.
GETTING STARTED
• Launching a ci+zen-‐science project involves a few essen+al steps.
– First, come up with a ques+on that takes full advantage of a network of amateur data-‐
collectors.
– Next, seek guidance from people who have
already built these kinds of projects, such as the Ci+zen Science Alliance.
WHAT TO WATCH FOR Challenges
1. People management
2. Guarantee the quality of the data 3. Recrui+ng volunteers and keeping
them engaged
Ci+zen science might appear to be all upside and liZle downside
• A way to get others to do cheaply what
researchers cannot or do not want to do. But that thinking can lead to trouble.
• “Ci+zen science is enormously expensive in terms of +me and effort managing people, websites and databases,” says Brohan
Challenges
• People management
– Andrea Wiggins
• a social scien+st who studies ci+zen science at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque as part of DataONE
• an NSF-‐funded project aimed at increasing the availability of Earth and environmental data.
• “You don’t necessarily know who is on the other end of a data point”
hZp://www.birds.cornell.edu/citscitoolkit/
conference/2012/agenda/speakers/wiggins
It is difficult to guarantee the quality of the data.
It could be a re+red botany professor repor+ng on wildflowers or a pure
amateur with an untrained eye.
Scien+sts have to design their
projects and protocols for anyone to follow, and must perform regular
quality control.
Planet Hunters
Planet Hunters-‐-‐LintoZ
To track how well ci)zen scien)sts can spot transits, and to measure the
sensi)vity of the system to different kinds 1. Insert fake planet signals
2. Do the same task on the same data
The sheer scale of the projects can create quality-‐control challenges.
The eBird project
The eBird project
25 million observa+ons a month handpicked
→reviewing less or automa+ng
“The science has to be roman+c, in a way, so that people want to
support the research behind it”
Jason Osborne, president and co-‐
founder of Paleo Quest, a ci+zen-‐
science organiza+on focused on palaeontology.
Projects have to be interes+ng, tangible and involve discovery
SharkFinder
SharkFinder
• “You put Panama in the kit, and kids are like,
‘Wow, I have a piece of Panama on my desk, and I am looking for fossil remains’,” says Osborne, no+ng that kids also love handling prehistoric fossils.
• “There has got to be that kind of wow factor.”
And if they discover a new species, Osborne’s ci+zen scien+sts might be named on a
publica+on or even be given the opportunity to name the species.
Whatever a volunteer’s mo+va+on even if it is just the joy of
par+cipa+ng scien+sts have to
understand and nurture it.
The ways to keep volunteers engaged
• Old Weather-‐Brohan's team
– Come up with a ranking system
• Classify images of storms-‐ScoZ Steven's team
– Iden+fy the best and invite them to do more
• As projects evolve, organizers can contact those super users and invite them to par+cipate at a higher level, perhaps by helping to analyze data or to manage groups of other ci+zen scien+sts.
The challenge of geung ci+zen-‐
science data through peer review
But that barrier is diminishing.
Publica+ons using data from ci+zen science are becoming more common, and even
encouraged.
• Researchers at Princeton University in New Jersey, for example, have used data from
Nature’s Notebook to expand a model of the +ming of leaf-‐bud burs+ng from the Harvard Forest area in MassachuseZs to the en+re eastern seaboard of the United States. The team published its expanded model this year (S.-‐J. Jeong et al. Geophys. Res. LeZ. 40, 359–
364; 2013).
Not only did peer reviewers
welcome the ci+zen science data, but one actually gave advice on how
to use the ci+zen-‐science model more effec+vely, says Weltzin.
Conclusion
• If all goes well, ci+zen science is a way to
communicate science, engage in outreach and accomplish research aims.
• “You are geung the informa+on that you need at the same +me that you are geung people involved,” says Weltzin.
• “It is like playing Whack-‐a-‐Mole with all
hammers out. You meet all of your objec+ves at one +me.”
Thanks for Attentions!
Citizen Science
11April 2013, Vol. 496, Nature, 259
