CYBERPSYCHOLOGY, BEHAVIOR, AND SOCIAL NETWORKING Volume 15, Number 6, 2012 ª Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. DOI: 10.1089/cyber.2012.1548
COLUMNS
CyberSightings
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yberSightings is a regular feature in CYBER that covers the news relevant to the Cyberpsychology community, including scientific breakthroughs, latest devices, conferences, book reviews, and general announcements of interest to researchers and clinicians. We welcome input for inclusion in this column, and relevant information and suggestions can be sent
[email protected]. In the Spotlight There is no doubt that amateur scientists have played a key role in the development of contemporary science. This term is commonly used to define individuals with a genuine passion for science who conduct experiments, build instruments, and collect data, usually without monetary compensation or reward. In the past centuries, amateur scientists have contributed many discoveries and observations. For example, Thomas Edison (who also founded the journal Science in 1880) was a self-taught amateur scientist; despite his poor education, he became one of the most prolific inventors of the modern age, achieving more than 1,000 patents in the United States. A more contemporary example is provided by amateur astronomer, Robert Evans, who holds the all-time record for individual visual discoveries of supernovae; this achievement becomes even more impressive if one considers that he used his own amateur’s 12-inch telescope. In today’s world, thanks to the new opportunites offered by the Internet, computer games, and smartphones, citizen science has become a mass phenomenon. The availability of these technologies has given raise to the so-called ‘‘scientific crowdsourcing,’’ which refers to the use of web-based collective collaboration tools as a means of solving research problems and creating innovations. The first, and by far probably the most popular, example of this approach is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—SETI@home project (http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/), which is based on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC). The objective of this program is to analyze radio signals, searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, by taking advantage of the computational power donated by a large Internet-based community. Although the program has not yet achieved its primary goal—detecting alien intelligence— it has demonstrated the viability of using distributed computing in scientific research, with more than five million participants worldwide (source: Wikipedia, http://en .wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI@home). The success of SETI has lead to several other ‘‘grid-computing’’ programs, such as Rosetta@home (http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta). The specific goal of this project, also based on the BOINC infrastructure, is to predict the interaction between proteins and also to design new proteins by involving the collaboration of more than 60,000 volunteered computers, for an overall computational power of 133,380 TeraFLOPS on average (at
December 2011). The software works by simulating the folding of an aminoacid sequence, but it does not require the input of participants. However, researchers subsequently realized that the program could achieve better results by leveraging human intuition and three-dimensional pattern matching skills. This idea lead to the development of Fold-it (http://fold.it/portal/), an online game that allows players to collaborate and compete in predicting the structure of protein molecules. By playing Fold-it, participants have achieved important results, such as solving (in less than 3 weeks) the structure of a retrovirus enzyme whose configuration had been investigated by biochemists for more than a decade. The potential of scientific crowdsourcing is being successfully exploited in several other research fields. For example, NASA’s Stardust@home citized science project (http://stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/) allows volunteers to help in the search for the first samples of solid matter from outside the solar system. To participate, volunteers must pass a test to qualify to register to participate. After registering and passing the test, they have access to the web-based ‘‘virtual microscope,’’ which allows a user to search for interstellar dust impacts; the discoverer of a dust particle is then rewarded by including his/her name as a co-author on scientific papers, and also has the privilege of naming the particle. Other projects are using scientific crowdsourcing to fight climate change and protect the environment. For example, the Australian organization ClimateWatch (www.climatewatch .org.au/) encourages participants to look for ‘‘indicator species,’’ which are plants and animals with life stages likely to be noticeably affected by changes in climate. Data collected by volunteers are then uploaded to the ClimateWatch Web site, where they are elaborated by researchers from the Bureau of Meteorology and the University of Melbourne. A similar initiative is the NestWatch (http://nestwatch.org/), a project launched in 2008 by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which aims at tracking reproductive success for all breeding birds in the United States, in order to understand better the impacts of environmental change on bird populations. This initiative, funded by the National Science Foundation, is proving also useful to monitor the effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Mexican Gulf. The Wildlife Health Event Reporter (www.whmn.org/wher/), instead, is a Web site that enables citizens to report sightings of sick or dead wildlife. As suggested by these examples, it is not necessary to be a genius in order to become a ‘‘citizen scientist.’’ On the other hand, participating in scientific research offers citizens the opportunity to learn and to understand better how the scientific process works in practice. In the past, these opportunities were limited by difficulties in accessing data and instruments and by the complexity of the methodologies. Today, some of these barriers can be lowered thanks to the availability of Internet-based tools and games, which allow citizens to contribute directly to the development of scientific knowledge.
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CYBERSIGHTINGS Upcoming Meetings Pervasive 2012 Newcastle, UK July 18–22, 2012 http://pervasiveconference.org/2012/ Human–Computer Confluence Summer School Milan, Italy July 18–20, 2012 www.hcsquared.eu/ IADIS International Conference Interfaces and Human–Computer Interaction 2012 Lisbon, Portugal July 21–23, 2012 www.ihci-conf.org/ SIGGRAPH ’12 — Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques Conference Los Angeles, California August 5–9, 2012 www.siggraph.org 14th ACM International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania September 5–8, 2012 www.ubicomp.org/ubicomp2012/ 9th International Conference on Disability, Virtual Reality and Associated Technologies Laval, France September 10–12, 2012 www.icdvrat.rdg.ac.uk/ 26th BCS Conference on Human–Computer Interaction Birmingham, UK September 12–14, 2012 http://hci2012.bcs.org/ Medicine 2.0 Conference 2012 Boston, Massachusetts September 15–16, 2012
333 www.medicine20congress.com/ocs/index.php/med/ med2012 17th Annual CyberPsychology and CyberTherapy Conference Brussels, Belgium September 25–28, 2012 www.interactivemediainstitute.com/CYBER17/ MobileHCI ’12—14th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services San Francisco, California September 29–October 3, 2012 www.mobilehci2012.org/ IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing Innsbruck, Austria September 30–October 4, 2012 http://vlhcc2012.di.unisa.it/ 7th Nordic Conference on Human–Computer Interaction Copenhagen, Denmark October 14–17, 2012 www.nordichi2012.org/ 14th ACM Conference on Computers and Accessibility Boulder, Colorado October 22–24, 2012 www.sigaccess.org/assets12/ 14th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction Santa Monica, California October 22–26, 2012 www.acm.org/icmi/2012/
Compiled by Andrea Gaggioli, Ph.D. Catholic University of Milan Milan, Italy
