Editor’s Choice: Citizen Science: Gamers help solve quantum questions

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This news piece overviews two games that engage citizen scientists in helping to develop quantum computing. I am partial to these projects because as a physicist, I have always been drawn in by the deep mysteries of quantum mechanics. And as a fun side note – as it turns out – for at least one of these projects, women tend to outperform men even though men spend more time playing the game.  — LFF —

Next time someone tells you computer games are a waste of time, there’s now a better response than saying you’re improving hand-eye co-ordination. Just say you’re helping science.

Increasingly, scientists are developing games where players’ moves help solve a problem or gather information for research.

Two Australian scientists, physicist Dr Simon Devitt, senior research scientist at the Centre for Emergent Matter Sciences in Tokyo, and Dr Austin Fowler, a quantum hardware engineer at Google in Santa Barbara, California, helped create a game called meQuanics, a quantum computing challenge designed to help develop the next generation of computers.

Photo Credit: Image from article – A screenshot from meQuanics, a new game helping to solve the challenges of quantum computing.

Source: Citizen Science: Gamers help solve quantum questions

To Sign Up, or not to Sign Up?

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Abstract:

Many citizen science projects ask people to create an account before they participate – some require it. What effect does the registration process have on the number and quality of contributions? We present a controlled study comparing the effects of mandatory registration with an interface that enables people to participate without registering, but allows them to sign up to ‘claim’ contributions. We demonstrate that removing the requirement to register increases the number of visitors to the site contributing to the project by 62%, without reducing data quality. We also discover that contribution rates are the same for people who choose to register, and those who remain anonymous, indicating that the interface should cater for differences in participant motivation. The study provides evidence that to maximize contribution rates, projects should offer the option to create an account, but the process should not be a barrier to immediate contribution, nor should it be required.

Source: To Sign Up, or not to Sign Up?

New report shows alarming state of North-American birds

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Since the seventies, millions of North American birds have disappeared and a third of species are now of high regional conservation concern, a new report reveals. Experts agree that their long-term conservation will only be achieved by building transnational partnerships and involving local communities in citizen science projects.

Migratory birds connect the North American continent as millions of birds move across the US, Canada and Mexico every year. An estimated 350 North American bird species share their distribution across more than 2 countries, underlining the importance of coordinated action to protect them.

Until now, the vulnerability score of over a thousand native North-American bird species was incomplete. ‘”The State of North America’s Birds’’ fills the gaps. Published on the 100th anniversary of the Convention for the Protection of Migratory Birds between the US and Canada, it is the first assessment of its kind.

The report reveals that of the 1154 native bird species that occur in continental North America, one third require urgent conservation action. The species in need of most urgent action are those that depend on oceans and tropical forests.

…

The report was put together by the North American Conservation Initiative and was built using data collected by volunteers and citizen scientists across the continent. Despite the alarming findings, the report demonstrates how the power of many can help us understand conservation needs and drive positive change. The results are a call to action to public and private sectors to come together to save migratory birds.

Source: New report shows alarming state of North-American birds

Towards a Genealogy of the Crowd in Crowdsourcing

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Surfing through the wealth of websites offering opportunities to contribute to scientific research (the so-called “citizen science”), whether by lending computer processor time for distributed computing projects or by requesting an actual human contribution, such as classifying galaxies, one cannot but marvel at the diversity of the vocabulary used to refer to users. They can be contributors, citizens, participants, donors, members of the public, or part of the crowd. If most of these words are somewhat related to politics, none has more political undertones than the latter. When we speak of the crowd (rather than a crowd of xyz), we see more than a great number of people; we think of, say, violent revolutionary mobs, mass political meetings, or protestors going on strike. And it is as if the word tacitly implied some kind of condescending denigration — as if the crowd only existed in relation to an elite few. When we speak of the crowd, we often imagine the patricians sneering at the plebs.

Should it come as a surprise that the popularity of “the crowd” reached its highest level between the 1880s and the 1930s, at a time when answering the “social question” (what holds society together) appeared pressing in the West? Probably not. However, what is much more startling is the recent upsurge in the use of the word. If, as Kelty (2012) has pointed out, thepeople was the major political category of the 17th and early 18th centuries, if the public was that of the late 18th century, and so on, what does it mean that we’re seemingly reverting to the crowd as one of the main political topoi of our times?

For contemporary advocates of crowdsourcing (Howe, 2006), the crowds of our times stand in striking contrast to those of the old days. Today, we have wise crowds (Surowiecki, 2005) and smart mobs (Rheingold, 2002), instead of the dangerous, irrational, and violent crowds of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Or maybe, the crowd has not really changed; rather, it is our view of the crowd that has undergone a wide transformation.

Source: Towards a Genealogy of the Crowd in Crowdsourcing

Po Ve Sham: A review of volunteered geographic information quality assessment methods

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One of the joys of academic life is the opportunity to participate in summer schools – you get a group of researchers, from PhD students to experienced professors, to a nice place in the Italian countryside, and for a week the group focuses on a topic – discussing, demonstrating and trying it out. The Vespucci Institute in 2014 that was dedicated to citizen science and Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) is an example for that. Such activities are more than a summer retreat – there are tangible academic outputs that emerge from such workshops – demonstrating that valuable work is done!

During the summer school in 2014, Hansi Senaratne suggested to write a review of VGI data quality approaches, and together with Amin Mobasheri and Ahmed Loai Ali (all PhD students) started to developed it. I and Cristina Capineri, as summer school organisers and the vice-chair & chair of COST ENERGIC network (respectively), gave advice to the group and helped them in developing a paper, aimed at one of the leading journal of Geographic Information Science (GIScience) – the International Journal of GIScience (IJGIS).

Source: Po Ve Sham: A review of volunteered geographic information quality assessment methods

Citizens for Science and Science for Citizens

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Abstract:

The rise of citizen science as a form of public participation in research has engaged many disciplines and communities. This paper uses the lens of Participatory Design to contrast two different approaches to citizen science: one that puts citizens in the service of science and another that involves them in the production of knowledge. Through an empirical study of a diverse array of projects, we show how participation in citizen science often takes the more limited forms suggested by the former approach. Our analysis highlights the implications of limited participation and demonstrates how the CHI community is uniquely positioned to ameliorate these limitations.

Source: Citizens for Science and Science for Citizens

Doing It Together Science

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Doing It Together Science (DITOs) will implement many innovative participatory event formats across Europe focusing on the active involvement of citizens in two critical areas: the cutting edge topic of biodesign and the pressing area of environmental monitoring. The project will advance the EU Responsible Research and Innovation agenda by moving beyond more traditional approaches into direct engagement that builds upon DIY, grassroots, and frugal innovation initiatives so that in the short and medium term we sustain localised capacity building and in the long term the effects of these grassroots efforts channel into policy action at different levels.

Source: Doing It Together Science

Editor’s Choice: A review of volunteered geographic information quality assessment methods

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This review grew out of a workshop held in 2014, but it directly addresses issues of validation which are alive in the community today, and which are of interest not only to geographic information projects but to many data analysis tasks. — CJL —

Abstract:

With the ubiquity of advanced web technologies and location-sensing hand held devices, citizens regardless of their knowledge or expertise, are able to produce spatial information. This phenomenon is known as volunteered geographic information (VGI). During the past decade VGI has been used as a data source supporting a wide range of services, such as environmental monitoring, events reporting, human movement analysis, disaster management, etc. However, these volunteer-contributed data also come with varying quality. Reasons for this are: data is produced by heterogeneous contributors, using various technologies and tools, having different level of details and precision, serving heterogeneous purposes, and a lack of gatekeepers. Crowd-sourcing, social, and geographic approaches have been proposed and later followed to develop appropriate methods to assess the quality measures and indicators of VGI. In this article, we review various quality measures and indicators for selected types of VGI and existing quality assessment methods. As an outcome, the article presents a classification of VGI with current methods utilized to assess the quality of selected types of VGI. Through these findings, we introduce data mining as an additional approach for quality handling in VGI.

Photo Credit: Figure 1 (from article) – A photo of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin is incorrectly geotagged in Jakarta, Indonesia on the popular photo sharing platform Flickr.

Source: A review of volunteered geographic information quality assessment methods

Citizen Science Reports: Cost-Benefit and Motivation

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Summary – Understanding Motivations for Citizen Science:

Citizen science plays an important role in delivering environmental data at local and national scales, and can form the basis of scientific research, as well as evidence for policy and management. Citizen science is also an important way of connecting people with nature, and has been used to help organisations communicate the importance of their work in the area of nature conservation. However, without an understanding of why and how people (nonprofessional volunteers) participate in citizen science, some initiatives could miss their mark and fail to provide the expected benefits to science and society. These social drivers of evidence-gathering by citizen scientists are often overlooked by stakeholders in favour of discussions around the need for and quality of the resulting data. This study explores the motivations of environmental-based citizen science participants and stakeholders from ‘science’, ‘policy’ and ‘practice’.

Summary – Citizen Science and Environmental Monitoring: Towards a Methodology for Evaluating Opportunities, Costs and Benefits:

The UK has a long history of volunteer involvement in monitoring the environment. This volunteer involvement, i.e citizen science, can complement, augment or even replace monitoring by contracted professionals. The UKEOF Citizen Science Working Group identified a need to understand more fully the potential for citizen science to support environmental monitoring programmes, and how to evaluate the relative costs and benefits of different approaches. Experts from WRc, CEH and Fera were contracted to undertake an analysis of the current and potential use of citizen science in environmental monitoring, and to develop a method for assessing the feasibility and viability of using citizen science. The project was conducted, between September 2015 and March 2016, and involved undertaking a survey to assess current volunteer engagement in governmental agencies and related bodies, a review of methodologies for valuing the contribution of citizen science and the development of an evaluation framework in the form of a spreadsheet tool for employing citizen science in environmental monitoring.

Source: Citizen Science Reports: Cost-Benefit and Motivation

Dead or Alive: Where Did the Animal (Try To) Cross the Road?

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Anyone who has driven Highway 3 between Elko and Alberta has seen wildlife — lots of wildlife. If you’re lucky, they were alive. But we’ve all seen our share of dead wildlife too, and in the worst cases, experienced a wildlife-vehicle collision personally. It can feel like an inevitable side effect of highway use, but it doesn’t have to be. A new program, RoadWatchBC, is putting increased highway safety for both people and wildlife into the hands of anyone with a smartphone or a computer.

RoadWatchBC is a new program created by Wildsight, the Miistakis Institute, the Western Transportation Institute, and the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative. RoadWatchBC is based on gathering information using citizen science—scientific research conducted primarily by regular citizens (and that means anyone reading this article!). Anyone can participate in the program by simply signing up online, or by using the free smartphone app, or an online mapping tool to record wildlife sightings on or near highways. The smartphone app has a simple, user-friendly interface whereby participants can instantaneously log wildlife sightings near or crossing the highway. Participants also have the option to use an online mapping tool at a later time (since the app is designed to be used by passengers and not drivers). Drivers just need to remember when, where and what animal they saw near or crossing the highway. Using these methods, citizens are able to partner with scientists to determine where animals tend to cross the highway or be struck by vehicles.

Gaining an understanding of wildlife movements along the highway is an important first step in developing mitigation strategies that reduce vehicle–wildlife collisions and maintain connected wildlife populations. Mitigation strategies include overpasses, underpasses, culverts, fencing and animal detection systems. These mitigation methods allows for a safe pathway for all forms of wildlife to migrate across highways. The information on vehicles and wildlife “hotspots” gained from the RoadWatchBC program will be shared with the British Columbia Transportation Ministry to determine potential areas where wildlife mitigation can be applied.

Source: Dead or Alive: Where Did the Animal (Try To) Cross the Road?