Citizen Science: Association of American Medical Colleges
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This document discusses how SciStarter connects regular people to real science projects they can participate in as citizen scientists. It notes that millions enjoy science but thousands of scientists need volunteers, and SciStarter helps connect them. Examples are given of large citizen science projects in fields like astronomy, environmental monitoring, and health. The document promotes SciStarter's role in organizing these projects, matching volunteers with researchers, and helping to scale up citizen science.
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Citizen Science: Association of American Medical Colleges
- 1. Darlene Cavalier www.scistarter.com Real science we can do together.
- 2. We connect regular people to real science they can do.
- 3. Millions of people enjoy science and nature. Thousands of scientists need volunteers. But they can’t find each other.
- 4. We connect them Scientist image and cit scientist images tk to illustrate “we connect them” We connect them
- 5. Someone you know is a CITIZEN SCIENTIST eBird 1.5 million reports Water testing 1.5 million monitors SETI@ home 5 million volunteers
- 6. Citizen Science IS Serious Science. Accelerating analysis of tumor samples in huge datasets. Forecasting solar activity that poses radiation risks to humans and hardware in space. Analyzing wild algae species for their potential to produce biofuels.
- 7. Organized, searchable inventory of projects. Distribution partners include Discover, PLOS, NSTA. WHYY. Matchmaker to help researchers ccoonnnneecctt wwiitthh ccoommmmuunniittiieess..
- 8. Citizen Science in Space! ArduSat, Nanosatisfi Put YOUR citizen science experiment in space. DIYers + Space Enthusiasts. Unite communities.
- 9. University of Waterloo’s Snow Tweets goal Help researchers calibrate accuracy of snow measurement tools task Measure snow where you are, tweet or upload your geotagged data
- 10. Examples of Citizen Microbe Projects: Human Microbiome Project (NIH) aims to develop tools and datasets for the research community to study microbes in human health and disease. Earth Microbiome Project (Templeton Foundation, Keck): Massive, interdisciplinary effort to analyze microbial communities across the globe. American Gut: Largest crowdfunded/citizen science human microbiome effort (3,000 participants). Open data. Project MERCCURI.
- 12. Partner up! Crowdsource We connect the them crowdsourcing.
- 13. Researchers hire us to recruit participants.
- 15. “Each vertical bar is one shoe or cell phone. The color represents a different species of bacteria.” www.MicroBE.net
- 17. From citizen science to citizen policy. Founders: Arizona State University (Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes), SciStarter, Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, Boston Museum of Science, Loka Institute
- 18. Help Inform NASA’s Asteroid Initiative! Text “GO” to 202.759.2340 ECASTonline.org
- 19. Consider funding opportunities from EPA, NPS, USGS, NASA and work with international partners. Photo credit: EPA.gov
- 20. Chris Schaffer, Dept. of Biomedical Engineering, Cornell University Alzheimer Mouse Brain Imagery Credit: Pietro Michelucci, Human Computation Institute Treatment Target 3D microvessel topology Blood Flow Annotations 60 Years TODAY < 2 Years Adapting Successful Citizen Science Models
- 21. We aim to make research more efficient by connecting communities of citizen scientists AND fields of research. -Protocols, Methodologies -Data collection/classification, sharing, visualization tools -Privacy -Recruitment, persistence (incentives, motivations) -Open data sets -Evaluation tools -Best practices, case studies -Societal, economic, cultural, political context To GET STARTED, contact Darlene Cavalier Darlene @ SciStarter [dot] com (267) 253 1310 .
Editor's Notes
- Microbial diversity depended greatly on how recently they took antibiotics. Spikes in microbial populations take place around the holidays. No single organism found in every person, some are more common across populations. People who sleep more and exercise outdoors, have more diverse microbiomes.
- The Home Microbiome Study is led by Jack Gilbert, Dan Smith and Jarrod Hampton Marcell at Argonne National Lab. It’s funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation They work with MicroBE.net (the Eisen Lab from UCDavis) and the Earth Microbiome Project to bring together microbial samples from as many environments as possible in order to understand how microbial community structure is shaped by environmental factors.
- In support of Alan Irwin’s definition of citizen science: The process of producing reliable knowledge could be developed and enacted by citizens themselves. People bring into science such things as local contextual knowledge and real-world geographic, political, and moral constraints generated outside of formal scientific institutions. As Dr. Caren Cooper puts it “While the “participatory” version of citizen science describes how people can serve as instruments in the scientific method, the “democratic” version shows how people can influence and transform the larger scientific enterprise. “The lowest common denominator to citizen science projects is the collection and/or processing of data. From that focal point, the collaboration between scientists and non-scientists can expand. If the collaboration expands enough, the resulting new relationship then takes on the vision presented by Irwin, characterized by new perspectives, collaborative action, trust, etc., leading ultimately to societal influence shaping scientific agendas and norms.
- Grants to support training, development of new tools, to monitor local air, water and soil quality. Depend on citizen scientists to formulate questions, cocreate or use tools to collect data/evidence, share data, help interpret results. What would you do with this information?How can you help connect more dots?
- BACKGROUND Since the discovery of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), one well-known symptom has been reduced blood flow to the brain, but the mechanism causing this decreased flow has been elusive. For this reason, no current therapies aim to improve brain blood flow, although this symptom likely contributes to cognitive impairment and accelerates disease progression. Using novel imaging methods that reveal the structure and function of the cerebral microvasculature, we have recently discovered a compelling potential explanation for reduced brain blood flow in AD. We have found that leukocytes adhere to the wall of brain capillaries in AD transgenic mice and stall flow in these capillary segments, leading to reduced blood flow. CITIZEN SCIENCE / CROWDSOURCING APPROACH The current research track seeks to identify the molecular pathways that cause leukocyte adhesion in capillary segments in AD, with the goal of identifying treatment targets to improve blood flow with minimal side effects, with the potential to disrupt disease progression and delay symptom onset. Because the imagery analysis for these studies requires extensive human curation, homing in on the specific pharmaceutical targets using traditional methods would take about 60 years. By crowdsourcing the blood flow analysis to citizen scientists, we expect to reduce that time to less than two years. In addition, this project provides fantastic opportunities to educate participating citizen scientists about AD and the process of biomedical research, leading to both improved science literacy and increased public understanding of and support for biomedical research. BUILD ON SUCCESSES Combining the perceptual and cognitive abilities of a distributed network of humans with the quantitative and administrative power of machines, when properly conceived and executed, has led to unprecedented research capabilities (e.g., fold.it, MalariaSpot, Parkinson’s Voice Initiative, PatientsLikeMe). The proposed approach seeks to employ such human computation methods to supplant the existing curation system with an ultrahigh-throughput, distributed online curation system in order to greatly accelerate the analysis of microvasculature structure and function in support of the biomedical research goals. REDUCE TREATMENT DISCOVERY FROM 60 YEARS to TWO YEARS The existing curation process would be renovated in stepwise fashion over the course of the project. The proposed approach seeks to reduce risk by opportunistically adapting existing components of successful human computation systems, where possible, to relevant curation operations. Thus, the three key curation steps would be renovated as follows: 3D mesh modeling - Adapt EyeWire model to extract topology of brain microvasculature Vessel annotation - Adapt stardust@home to score individual capillary segments as flowing or stalled Vessel classification – develop workflow and interface to crowdsource classification of cause of stalled capillaries, to keep pace with increased throughput in steps 1 & 2. IMPACT BEYOND ALZ The potential utility of the system that would result from the proposed work extends beyond AD. Microcirculatory dysfunction is likely present in many diseases – diabetes, hypertension, brain trauma, malignant tumors, etc. Due to a lack of tools to analyze disrupted capillary flow it is not clear how extensive or how significant such dysfunction may be. The proposed work will lead to an end-to-end, crowd-powered experimental toolkit for expeditiously investigating the role of micro-vessel flow dynamics in a variety of diseases. Resultant disease models could give rise to new treatments.