Open Science Panel
The world has come a long way since a screensaver called SETI@home was launched in 1999, enabling anyone with a PC to help in the search for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. Today ‘citizen cyberscience’ encompasses a huge range of scientific research, from simulating climate change to folding proteins. This is the cutting edge of the Open Science movement, making scientific research not just open and accessible, but participative as well.
In this panel, several leading exponents of citizen cyberscience will discuss how their projects are producing open knowledge in a wide variety of domains, and in particular the sort that can contribute to the social sciences and economics. The session will be followed immediately by an extended Q&A in workshop room II. The speakers are:
by Francois Grey and Rufus Pollock on June 30th at 11:00 in Track II
Dirk Brockman, Northwestern University, about how amateur tracking of the movement of dollar bills can inform about epidemiology and social networks.
David Aanensen, of Imperial College London, on the open source smartphone project EpiCollect for tracking wildlife, surveying plants and doing epidemiological studies in the field.
Carl Christensen, Stanford University on how to turn your laptop and PC into part of a public network for earthquake sensing, and how the resulting citizen-based data is leading to new scientific insights.
Nicolas Maire, the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, Basel on how volunteer computing can help African governments to decide rationally on whether to invest in malaria vaccines.
Lucas Mation, Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada, Brasilia, on an ambitious plan to involve Brazilian citizens in the digitization of millions of tomes of archived economics data
Daniel Lombraña González, Citizen Cyberscience Centre, Geneva on new approaches to improving the reliability of volunteer-based contributions to mapping humanitarian crises and climate change impact.
The session is chaired by Rufus Pollock of the Open Knowledge Foundation and Francois Grey of the Citizen Cyberscience Centre. The support of the Shuttleworth Foundation for this panel is gratefully acknowledged.
Rufus Pollock
Daniel Dietrich
Jason Kitcat
Sebastian Hellmann
Lucy Chambers
Hauke Gierow
[...] I’m all for openness. But as I said when introducing a Panel Session on Open Science in Berlin, I’m not interested in opennenss as an end in itself, but rather as a means to an [...]