Experimental Tribe: (not so) serious games for scientific purposes
The Everyaware team will participate to the “Second Workshop on Computational Social Science and the Wisdom of Crowds” (within NIPS2011) with a presentation of Experime ...
Citizen cyberscientists gather in 2012
The 2012 edition of the London Citizen Cyberscience Summit has been recently announced. It will take place in London from 16 to 18 February 2012, and some leading figures of worldw ...
The net delusion of the healthcare system
In a recent blog post, Andy Oram complains about the difficulty of applying a Silicon-Valley-like attitude toward innovation at the U.S. healthcare system. Lots of regulations, eve ...
How many birds are there?
Humans are still the best systems in recognizing acoustic patterns. For example, volunteers perform much better than machines in associating vocalizations to the corresponding spec ...
28 days left to support the Easter (Air Quality) Egg
Air quality monitoring is often performed by a small number of fixed station in some selected spots in cities. But a new wave of participatory monitoring initiatives is going to ch ...
Communities of people are better mappers if they are spatially clustered, as revealed in an interesting new paper by Hristova, Mashhadi, Quattrone and Capra from UCL. “This preliminary analysis inspires further inquiry because it shows a clear correlation between spatial affiliation, the internal community structure and the community’s engagement in terms of coverage”, according to the authors. They have studied the similarity patterns among eight hundred contributors to OpenStreetMap, the well-known crowdmapping project and detected the hidden community structure. It is a very promising field of research, coupling a social network analysis of crowdsourced data. Participants to such projects are rarely independent individuals: in most cases, they involve communities more than single participants and it would be crucial to uncover how the underlying social structure reflects on the quantity and the quality of the collected data. It has the greatest relevance for citizen science projects, as data quality is often the key issue determining the success or the failure of the collective effort.
Berlin bike parking
The city of Berlin has recently asked to its inhabitants what they think about open data in an online poll. Voters were asked which open data they would prefer to have access to and what they would do with that (just read them, or spread the information to other people?) In a few weeks, the municipality has gathered around 1300 votes. The results are consistent with another poll, at a national level, realized by SAS on a representative sample. 92% of the Berlin sample would access open data, if possible, and half of the interviewed people declared that they would use the data, editing them for other people. Voters have shown to be more interested in data concerning the city planning, the administration and the environment. Few people have shown interest for pets, consumer counseling or family data (no matter what this means). The Berlin poll is probably skewed toward highly educated, affluent internet users. But is this the most efficient way of leveraging people awareness to improve the urban quality of life?
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From the ESA AppCamp website: Are you an innovative developer from Europe with experience in app development? Then take your chance and apply to spend one week at the European Space Agency (ESA) near Rome between 18 and 22 June 2012. ESA is inviting 20 developers to its ESRIN location in Frascati (including travel expenses and accommodation) – and you can be one of them! Whether you are selected for the App Camp will depend on the creativity of your previous works with regard to content, usability, design, and the underlying business concepts, so show us the best apps you have developed.
Are they dangerous for the environment?
Timo Goeschl and Ole Juergens from Heidelberg University (Germany) have just published a provocative paper (paywalled, but a similar argument can be found here) about the impact of citizen science on the overall environmental quality. According to the abstract of their paper, they “show that improved citizen monitoring can even have adverse effects on environmental quality”.
ISQL2012 will take place within the 8th AIAI conference (27-30 September 2012 at Halkidiki, Greece). So, the actual workshop date is still to be announced.
From the workshop webpage: Quality of Life (QoL) is directly related to environmental pressures and conditions, including air quality, pollen, drinking and bathing water quality, noise pollution, waste production, energy consumption, nutrition and many others.
The conference venue...
