Science and AAAS, on citizen science games

Humans best computers in atom-snatching game

By Adrian Cho, Apr 13, 2016

Bring Home Water relies on people’s knack for performing tasks that involve dynamic movement. […] Jacob Sherson, the physicist at Aarhus University in Denmark who led the team that developed the game, says he expected people would fail miserably at the task. “I thought we would do this, and we would find out that it doesn’t work,” he says. “That’s been one of the biggest surprises, that if you give people 1 or 2 seconds they come up with solutions that are better than any that a computer comes up with.” […]

For RNA paper based on a computer game, authorship creates an identity crisis

By John Bohannon, Feb 17, 2016

A journal published a paper today that reveals a set of folding constraints in the design of RNA molecules. So far, so normal.

Most of the data for the study come from an online game that crowdsources solutions from thousands of nonexpert players—unusual but not unique.

But the lead authors of the paper are the (EteRNA) players themselves. Now that is a first. And there’s a twist: The journal nearly delayed publication because of “ethical” concerns about authors using only their game names.[…]

Researchers turn to volunteer readers to speed research on rare genetic disorder

By Esther Landhuis, May 21, 2015

Biomedical research is often slow and incremental, but it can take a leap when someone uncovers a hidden connection. For example, researchers might never have tested a hunch that fish oil eases symptoms of Raynaud syndrome, a circulatory disorder, if an information scientist hadn’t taken the time to painstakingly scour stacks of technical articles on the seemingly unrelated topics.

It’s likely that other game-changing links lurk elsewhere in the biomedical literature. But with new papers getting published every 30 seconds, scientists are hard-pressed to find those needle-in-haystack connections. Today, one group of researchers is launching a crowdsourcing initiative to pave the way, by harnessing the efforts of lay volunteers who will scan papers for key terms to help create a powerful searchable database.[…]

Interview with Amy Robinson, Creative Director

By John Bohannon, May 5, 2014

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS—Amy Robinson pulls no punches. When asked about her knowledge of neurons when she joined Sebastian Seung’s lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology less than 2 years ago, she doesn’t miss a beat. “I knew jack shit!” But a few days ago, this college dropout became a co-author on a Nature paper that brings us a step closer to understanding how the eye’s neurons are wired to detect motion. “Yeah, how about that?” she says with an enormous grin.

Robinson, 28, is creative director of EyeWire, the citizen science game that made the Nature paper possible by harnessing thousands of volunteers to map the neural circuits across microscope images of a mouse’s retina. Her job title is a sign of the times. On 1 May Robinson was at the White House in Washington, D.C., speaking at the Office of Science and Technology Policy’s first workshop on citizen science.

Building and maintaining an army of citizen scientists requires more than good management skills, Robinson says. It also takes creativity. For the EyeWire project, that means doing everything from helping to ensure that a neuroscience game is engaging enough to generate a steady stream of data for the lab, to engaging the public herself on stage.

Science Careers sat down with Robinson to discuss crowdsourced neuroscience, TED, and how to get a job by giving unsolicited advice. The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.[…]

Computer Game Reveals ‘Space-Time’ Neurons in the Eye

By John Bohannon, May 5, 2014

The stumbling block is a lack of fine-grained anatomical detail about how the neurons in the retina are wired up to each other. Although researchers have imaged the retina microscopically in ultrathin sections, no computer algorithm has been able to accurately trace out the borders of all the neurons to map the circuitry. At this point, only humans have good enough spatial reasoning to figure out what is part of a branching cell and what is just background noise in the images. Enter the EyeWire project, an online game that recruits volunteers to map out those cellular contours within a mouse’s retina. […]