Excerpt: Citizens who research and gather data: digital media are opening up whole new ways for science to arrive at new insights. Citizen science is in gold rush fever, with researchers around the world – at University of Zurich (UZH) as well − sounding out the potential of crowd-sourced research and hatching promising new project ideas. This year’s LERU (League of European Research Universities) Doctoral Summer School, organized by the Graduate Campus at UZH under the banner “Citizen Science – Nexus between Research and Public Engagement,” revolved around participatory research. Forty-four junior researchers from all over Europe met to exchange and develop professionally. At the end of last week at UZH, seven Summer School working groups presented their ideas for citizen science projects, and discussed them with their peers and a range of experts.
Under great pressure – they had only around 24 hours –they came up with project outlines covering an astonishingly broad array of research topics. The ideas included enlisting the help of laypeople to ferret out and document old lost movies, analyze and measure medical images to improve the diagnosis of disease, and track down harmful asbestos in cities.
Source: Nickl, Roger, 2017. Friendly Wake-up Calls and Fine Tomatoes, 14 July 2017. Available at UHZ News: http://www.news.uzh.ch/en/articles/2017/doctoral-summer-school-0.html [Last accessed 1 August 2017]