Experiences and opportunities for citizen science in biomedical science. Talk given at #CitSci2015 citizen science conference panel.

1. Biomedical citizen
science: successes and
opportunities
Benjamin Good
The Scripps Research Institute
@bgood

2. Types of Biomedical Citizen
Science
• Personal data: 23andme surveys, ubiome!, …
• Microtasks: large in number, small in difficulty
• Megatasks: Small in number, high in difficulty
Good & Su 2013. Crowdsourcing for Bioinformatics. Bioinformatics

3. Citizens enhance the capacity of
traditional science
by performing microtasks
• Processing images (tagging, tracing)
• Annotating concepts in text: mark2cure.org
Keys for success: volume, redundancy, aggregation, gold
standards for training and quality assessment

4. More than microtasks, not quite
megatasks: Visual Reasoning
Foldit: 3D Protein Structure Puzzles
DNA Sequence Alignment
Key to making it fun and productive is a good
automated scoring function

5. Citizen scientists performing the
megatasks usually reserved for
professional scientists
(Khatib et al 2011) “Algorithm discovery
by protein folding game players” PNAS
Open Innovation Contest Platforms

6. Successful megatasks
• Large, diverse user population
• Well-defined problem
• Rapid, high quality feedback on
proposed solutions

7. EteRNA
http://eterna.cmu.edu/
1. Its a game! - rapid feedback, visual, beautiful
2. Its a weekly competition! the winners are rewarded with real
laboratory tests of their hypotheses about how a string of RNA will
fold in 3 dimensions
3. Its a community forum for creating RNA design rules
4. Its a machine learning system for learning RNA design rules
5. Its a MASSIVE OPEN ONLINE LABORATORY !!!!
6. Its working! (Lee 2013) RNA design rules from a massive open laboratory, PNAS

8. Identifying new
opportunities
• “Measurement is the beginning of [citizen] science”
• Look for problems where it is possible to provide
rapid, high quality feedback about progress

9. Needs
• Frame the process
• Reduce barriers to entry
Games are the Gateway Drugs!
• Short, high-quality feedback loops
• Deeper learning, discovery paths

10. Motivation is the easy part

11. Opportunities
• Biology and medicine provide a
heroic purpose for citizen science –
not unlike the more traditional
purpose of saving the world from
aliens. Scientist