London Citizen Cyberscience Summit

Did you hear the news this month? Mainstream media picked up big time on an article in the top science journal Nature, about an online game for folding proteins. Amazingly, participants spontaneously teamed up to find new strategies for doing the folding, putting them light years ahead of what computer algorithms could achieve.

This sort of citizen cyberscience is what we are going to be talking about at the London Citizen Cyberscience Summit. It is really social networking with a scientific purpose. And we have examples ranging from mathematics to mapping, and from astronomy to the performing arts. But besides giving a flavor of the eclectic nature of citizen cyberscience today – it is NOT all SETI@home anymore, believe me! – the meeting will be a chance for many of the top volunteers on these projects to tell the scientists what makes projects compelling – and what scientists could do to get even more people to help.

Speakers

One of the first speakers is the profoundly influential science historian, philosopher and kayak-builder, George Dyson, whose ‘Darwin among the Machines’ proved deeply influential in Silicon Valley a decade ago. He will reveal the early, forgotten origins of citizen cyberscience.

We have David Anderson, director of SETI@home coming to talk. He’s helped launch dozens of other projects since then, thanks to the wonderful open source platform BOINC that he created for volunteer computing.

Hanny van Arkel became famous for discovering a mysterious celestial object while participating in the GalaxyZoo volunteer thinking project. Hanny, who is a school teach and plays in a rock band, is now also immortalized in the night sky, as Hanny’s Voorwerp (it means object, in Dutch!).

Rytis Slatkevicius developed his own volunteer computing project to find prime numbers. Now, several years later, this young MBA student gets to collaborate with top mathematicians around the globe, who are keen to analyse the unique database of primes he has built up.

These are just four of the over 20 amazing scientists and citizens who will be talking at the event, and brainstorming together with the rest of the audience and the online world about even better ways to do citizen cyberscience.

Registration

Just go to www.citizencyberscience.net and you will find the programme and the online registration. At just ten pounds, this is a nominal fee to cover the coffee break costs – sponsors are kindly covering the rest. It’s a great deal and surely will be a fun time. The venue is a revamped anatomy theater, so you can imagine the cadavers being dissected while you listen to the talk. Come on, that IS pretty funky, isn’t it? As they say, though, hurry while tickets last!