How can citizen science help preserve ancient Egyptian ruins? Modern- day Indiana Jones Dr. Sarah Parcak of the University of Alabama has one answer: Working with the global citizen science and crowdsourcing community, Parcak aims to use satellite imagery to discover and protect hidden archaeological sites around the world.
The winner of the 2016 TED Prize, space archaeologist Parcak announced on Feb. 16 that she plans to use the $1 million grant to create Global Xplorer, the first crowdsourced online platform to locate archaeological sites using satellites.
Analyzing infrared satellite images and tracking discrepancies in the terrain, Parcak has already potentially discovered 17 pyramids and more than 3,100 settlements and 1,000 tombs in Egypt. However, with potentially millions of sites left to be found, she cannot undertake this challenge alone. By engaging the global citizen scientists and crowdsourcing community, Parcak aims to preserve as much of the world’s cultural heritage as possible. Continue reading “Indiana Jones as a Citizen Scientist ?”→
PRESS RELEASE, Abu Dhabi, 16 July 2015 – The Eye on Earth Summit 2015 launched its Data Innovation Showcase today, with two challenges calling on citizen scientists and designers to use open data for creative projects and captivating visualizations on the state of the global environment. An additional competition invites bloggers to write about how open data can enable a more sustainable future and healthier planet. The winners of each challenge will be given the opportunity to participate in the Eye on Earth Summit in Abu Dhabi, on 6-8 October.
The Data Innovation Showcase invites citizen scientists to submit project solutions that use open data to fight food waste, manage forest ecosystems or boost biodiversity in cities. The scope of the projects depends on the ingenuity of their developers and can include anything from a food donation platform matching excess with need, to a crowdsourced map using open data to do tree inventory. Three finalists of the Citizen Science Challenge will be given the opportunity to present their project to the delegates at the 2015 Eye on Earth Summit in Abu Dhabi, where a final winner will be selected.
The Data Visualization Challenge invites artists, designers, and creatives from across the globe to submit data visualizations that interpret the social and economic effects of poor air quality, oceanic warming and natural disasters. Applicants are invited to build images, data animations, infographics, 3D models, computer simulations, interactive maps and diagrams and other types of visualizations. One finalist will be selected to present their data visualization at the Summit.
The Blogging Competition invites writers and bloggers worldwide to help catalyze the #DataRevolution and address one of the most pressing environmental challenges of our time – how to enhance the availability of information and knowledge to enable a more sustainable future and healthier planet. Under the theme ‘A better world through knowledge and information’, entrants are being asked to submit an inspirational piece that looks at how data and information can make a difference to ordinary people’s lives. The winner will be named the “Official Eye on Earth Summit 2015 Blogger” and will be hosted at the Summit to report live on the event for a global audience.
The Commons Lab is excited to participate and will be entering the Blogging Competition. We hope to see fellow U.S. citizen science groups rise to the challenge(s)!
PoliConnect, the Policy Award winners. In 31 hours the team created a platform to facilitate connection between policy makers and experts advice.
We are happy to announce an incredibly successful first-ever DC Science Hack Day!
Quick Statistics:
Over 100 people attended
Around 15 hackers stayed through the night
13 hacks were produced — details can be found on the wiki here: http://sciencehackday.pbworks.com/w/page/96114032/dchacks2015
Incredible gender, age and race diversity. Ages 10 – 80!
Government employees were highly represented — with lightning talks from EPA, NIH, State Department, NASA and participants from Department of Commerce, different branches of the military, OMB and NARA
Commons Labs favorite hacks (but they were all so incredible….):
LickitySplit — citizen science to the rescue! This team 3D printed the casing for a spectrometer to analyze your spit instantly and visualize the data.
If no one hears it — NASA scientists and arts team up to bring you an sound landscape of deforestation using freely available landsat data. Each tone represents a different type of deforestation.
PoliConnect — a platform to anonymously connect policy makers with policy experts. The Commons Lab has invited this team to come back to the Wilson Center to demo their hack to a policy audience! Test it out here: http://www.policonnect.org/
In the coming weeks we will be putting out a publication highlighting each hack and why these types of open participation models are important to every field, not just to science and technology. Stay tuned.
Our amazing judges for the event (L-R): Lakita Edwards, NEA; Steven Kostant, TidePool Media; Ariel Waldman, Founder Science Hack Day; Beth Beck, NASA; Greg Godbout, EPA
What happens when you bring together the forces of innovation, big data and climate change? The following amazing winners of the United Nations “Big Data Climate Challenge.” As the barriers to access big data drop the ability for innovation increases and the results are incredible.
“The Big Data Climate Challenge is a global competition hosted by United Nations Global Pulse, an initiative of the Secretary-General on big data. The Challenge was launched in May 2014 to unearth fresh evidence of the economic dimensions of climate change around the world using data and analytics. Submissions were received from 40 countries, representing more than 20 topics from forestry, biodiversity and transportation to renewable energy and green data centers.
Two overall Big Data Climate Challenge winners and seven “Projects to Watch” were selected by a high-level Advisory Board and Technical Committee of global experts in climate science, sustainable development and big data. Submissions were evaluated on their use of big data, economic relevance, stakeholder engagement, originality and scalability. The “Projects to Watch” were chosen to highlight particularly innovative uses of big data in emerging topics and geographic regions.”
Traditional monitoring of arms control treaties, agreements, and commitments has required the use of National Technical Means (NTM)—large satellites, phased array radars, and other technological solutions. NTM was a good solution when the treaties focused on large items for observation, such as missile silos or nuclear test facilities. As the targets of interest have shrunk by orders of magnitude, the need for other, more ubiquitous, sensor capabilities has increased. The rise in web-based, or cloud-based, analytic capabilities will have a significant influence on the future of arms control monitoring and the role of citizen involvement.
Since 1999, the U.S. Department of State has had at its disposal the Key Verification Assets Fund (V Fund), which was established by Congress. The Fund helps preserve critical verification assets and promotes the development of new technologies that support the verification of and compliance with arms control, nonproliferation, and disarmament requirements.
Sponsored by the V Fund to advance web-based analytic capabilities, Sandia National Laboratories, in collaboration with Recorded Future (RF), synthesized open-source data streams from a wide variety of traditional and nontraditional web sources in multiple languages along with topical texts and articles on national security policy to determine the efficacy of monitoring chemical and biological arms control agreements and compliance. The team used novel technology involving linguistic algorithms to extract temporal signals from unstructured text and organize that unstructured text into a multidimensional structure for analysis. In doing so, the algorithm identifies the underlying associations between entities and events across documents and sources over time. Using this capability, the team analyzed several events that could serve as analogs to treaty noncompliance, technical breakout, or an intentional attack. These events included the H7N9 bird flu outbreak in China, the Shanghai pig die-off and the fungal meningitis outbreak in the United States last year.
Each day, humans upload more than 500 million photographs documenting every aspect of their lives. But while striking, this statistic pales in comparison to the vast quantity of information created not by humans, but about them. These data come from technologies as diverse as GPS-enabled Smartphones, wearable pedometers, and information captured in web logs and cookies.
This generated information is big data, defined as “large, diverse, complex, longitudinal and/or distributed datasets generated form instruments, sensors, Internet transactions, email, video, click streams, and/or all other digital sources available today and in the future.” Big data brings tremendous potential for advancing scientific research. One researcher studying 35,000 schizophrenia patients demonstrated a genetic variant that eluded previous researchers working with smaller sample sizes. But big data also sharpens the potential for subtle, or even invisible, forms of discrimination. For example, algorithms determining which audiences receive offers for student loans could be so finely tuned that they target only people of a certain, gender, race, or income bracket. Continue reading “Big Data: Seizing Opportunities, Preserving Values”→
WNYC Data Journalist Noah Veltman will discuss the principles and pitfalls of turning data into stories, including how it relates to citizen science efforts.
Topics that will be explored:
Finding/cleaning data
The different flavors of bad data
How newsrooms design visualizations
What not to do when making a map
How to lie with charts
Noah Veltman is a developer and datanaut for the WNYC Data News Team. He builds interactive graphics, maps and data-driven news apps, and spends a lot of time spelunking in messy spreadsheets. Prior to WNYC, he was a Knight-Mozilla OpenNews Fellow at BBC News in London. Other projects by Noah can be found here: http://noahveltman.com/sandbox.
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EVENT DETAILS
Friday, May 2, 2014 9:00-11:00 am 6th Floor Conference Room Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars 1300 Pennsylvania Ave NW Washington, DC 20004
The deadline is looming for the third round of Presidential Innovation Fellows! The third round of the program is focused on addressing three initiatives:
1) Making Digital the Default: Building a 21st Century Veterans Experience
2) Data Innovation: Unleashing the Power of Data Resources to Improve Americans’ Lives
3) By the People, for the People: Crowdsourcing to Improve Government
“This highly-competitive program recruits talented, diverse individuals from the innovation community and pairs them with top civil servants to tackle many of our nation’s biggest challenges, and to achieve a profound and lasting social impact,” according to the White House. Since August 2012, fellows have teamed up with those in government to develop new solutions to all manner of problems.
Think you’ve got what it takes? Applications are due April 7, 2014 — you can start the process here.
And be sure to check out our report on citizen science and government here.
Have you ever wondered what the weather is like on Mars? Now you can find out — Sol, the galaxy’s first interplanetary weather application, integrates weather data collected by the Curiosity Rover on Mars with earth data, displaying weather on both planets in real time.
This app, used by astronauts and space enthusiasts alike, was developed for a challenge hosted by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Founded in 2012, the annual Space Apps Challenge asks volunteers to solve real-world problems using open data. NASA’s Space Apps challenge was founded in response to the President’s 2011 Open Government National Action Plan, designed to engage the public in government activities.
After our recent New Visions for Citizen Science event, Erin Heaney, director of the Clean Air Coalition of Western New York, sat down with the Wilson Center’s Context program to talk about how her environmental group uses citizen science and why people don’t necessarily need a science degree to participate in citizen science projects.
The group shows citizens in Western New York how to monitor air quality using a hand vacuum, which is helpful in aggregating data about pollution in neighborhoods that might be lacking monitors. The group has used this information to help the Environmental Protection Agency and state authorities better regulate air near Tonawanda, NY, including one case that resulted in criminal and civil penalties and significant reductions in pollution.
Wilson Center: Commons Lab 
