Besides describing some pretty cool science, this article touches on distributed computing as a mode of citizen science but also points to the difficulties of keeping a good citizen science project funded. –LFF     Milkyway@Home is in trouble. The citizen science-powered search for our galaxy’s dark matter lost all of its federal funding last…

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Republished from the open access peer-reviewed journal PLOS One. Abstract: Volunteers are increasingly being recruited into citizen science projects to collect observations for scientific studies. An additional goal of these projects is to engage and educate these volunteers. Thus, there are few barriers to participation resulting in volunteer observers with varying ability to complete the…

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This is a reposting of a guest post on VOLCROWE to Crowdsourcing Week submitted by Dr. Eun Young Oh, a senior research associate at the University of Portsmouth Business School. –LFF   VOLCROWE (Volunteer and Crowdsourcing Economics) is a research collaboration between the Universities of Portsmouth, Oxford, Manchester and Leeds, funded by the EPSRC and NEMODE…

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Reposting from the online peer-reviewed journal First Monday. Abstract: Citizen science has seen enormous growth in recent years, in part due to the influence of the Internet, and a corresponding growth in interest. However, the few stand-out examples that have received attention from media and researchers are not representative of the diversity of the field…

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This paper, by Ramine Tinati of the University of Southampton et al, studies Eyewire‘s use of real-time chat, looking at the contributions of both chatting and non-chatting members of the community. It was published in ACM Web Science 2015, and is available as a preprint here. Citizen science is changing the process of scientific knowledge…

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The Internet, Web 2.0 and Social Networking technologies are enabling citizens to actively participate in “citizen science” projects by contributing data to scientific programs. However, the limited expertise of contributors can lead to poor quality or misleading data being submitted. Subsequently, the scientific community often perceive citizen science data as not worthy of being used in serious…

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Hurricane shown on a weather radar (Photo: NOAA) Civic minded citizen scientists in your community help meteorologists and the National Weather Service stay abreast of inclement weather with on-the-ground data. Earlier this week, the Midwest and Northeast were slammed with tornados and thunderstorms that grounded planes and held up trains. Thousands of people along the…

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We show how machine learning and inference can be harnessed to leverage the complementary strengths of humans and computational agents to solve crowdsourcing tasks. We construct a set of Bayesian predictive models from data and describe how the models operate within an overall crowdsourcing architecture that combines the eorts of people and machine vision on…

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