Content about volunteer computing

Earthquake warning systems are an expensive proposition — but not when crowdsourced via smartphones. Scientists recently tested consumer devices, and were surprised at what they found.

Researchers from the University of Surrey, UK, have developed an iPad app that could change the way wildlife is monitored in the future. The Wildsense app loads photos of tigers from the web for analysis by players in return for points. These ‘citizen scientists’ examine these photos and provide further behavioral context that does not typically exist with the image alone. For example, how many tigers are in the image, what are the tigers doing, and what is their environment?

LHC@home recently celebrated a decade since its launch in 2004. Through its SixTrack project, the LHC@home platform harnesses the power of volunteer computing to model the progress of sub-atomic particles traveling at nearly the speed of light around CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. The number of projects supported by LHC@home is growing and the platform now has over 100,000 users from across the globe.

The Citizen Cyberscience Summit was held in London, UK, last month. The event featured a host of exciting projects, from classifying galaxies and enhancing solar panels, to growing sunflowers and analyzing baby laughter.

The CMS collaboration — one of the two experiments responsible for discovering the Higgs boson at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider — is set to make a significant portion of its data open to the public. The collaboration is also working with Finland’s IT Center for Science to give high-school students access to this data and to enable them to carry out some simple particle-physics analysis.

Fermín Serrano, coordinator of Europe's 'Socientize' project, lays out his manifesto for citizen science. He argues that citizen science is much more than just a useful communication tool, or an efficient way of maximizing researchers' resources. He believes citizen science has the power to teach people important new skills and is a way to fundamentally democratize scientific research.

The AEGIS experiment needs you! Discover how you can help analyse experimental results to figure out how antimatter is affected by gravity.

At TedxCERN, 18-year-old Florida high school student and Google Science Fair Winner, Brittany Wenger, explained how she built a neural network to help tackle breast cancer.

Catherine Gater reports from the 5^th CAPRI Evaluation Meeting in Utrecht, The Netherlands. The event focused on assessing and improving the performance of docking methods in predicting the 3D structure of protein complexes.

Faced with the daunting prospect of profiling the complexities of the immune system, researchers at Harvard Medical School/Business School enlisted the help of the world’s largest community of software experts on the site TopCoder.  A recent paper in Nature Biotechnology indicates a cultural shift in academia with experts engaging the collective skills of those outside their community, in order to help them overcome methodological barriers to their work.

A researcher from the University of Missouri has broken a 4-year-old record for the largest ever prime number discovered. The discovery was made thanks to the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, a distributed computing project established in 1996.