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Citizens e-Science

I am leading an international group of telecoms experts who have been providing advice to the Obama Transition Team on a range of digital economy, telecoms infrastructure and new media development; an overseas perspective on the problems and opportunities in the USA. One of the reports was on e-science and this was a section on citizens - e-science.

Widespread citizen science, and widespread, multi-nation collaboration are apt to lead to developments that would not have happened, or at least not as fast, as when science was done by a tiny few, separated from each other by time, space, language, secrecy, etc. This is not a “wisdom of crowds” point, but a “stand on the shoulders of giants” point. The result of joint collaboration can often be more than the sum of individual contributions, and modern technology and widespread, albeit not universal literacy help increase the ease of collaboration and thus the likelihood that it does occur.

Resources and attention to promoting the process, like a “science network” makes eminent sense in this context. Let’s make it even easier for our best and brightest to collaborate.

In an open broadband environment, a science initiative will allow us to bring supercomputing to end users. These end-users can participate in virtual laboratories, and collaborate over high performance distributed computing, using the web and the grid. This is already happening, in a way; we already see NASA utilising the power of over a million ‘very professional amateur’ astronomers scattered all over the planet. Imagine if that idea is expanded into the other areas of science and education. A common aphorism among technology companies is that “most of the smartest people in the world work for someone else.” This recognizes that no matter how talented a particular organization might be, no one organization can ever hope to employ all, or even most, of the truly talented and innovative people in its field. Now imagine what this means on a national or worldwide scale: an e-Science initiative combined with real open broadband can help harness the talents of hundreds of millions of people nationwide and worldwide. The amount of innovation that will take place in this dynamic field of interaction is simply mindboggling.

Many Eyes - e-science web site

The web site was launched in 2007 and was created by US scientists to help people publish and discuss graphics in a group.

People can share more technical types of displays: graphs, charts and other visuals they create to help them analyse data buried in spreadsheets, tables or text. With an experimental Web site, Many Eyes, users can upload the data they want to visualize, then use sophisticated tools to generate interactive displays. These might range from maps, relationships in data bases or publications, displays of the comparative frequency of words used in speeches, etc.

Those who register at the site can comment on one another’s work, perhaps visualizing the same information with different tools and discovering unexpected patterns in the data. It offers 16 ways to present data, from stack graphs and bar charts to diagrams that let people map relationships. TreeMaps, showing information in colourful rectangles, are among the popular tools. One tool, called an interleaved tag cloud, lets users compare side by side the relative frequencies of the words in two text passages.

Almost all the tools are interactive, allowing users to change parameters, zoom in or out or show more information when the mouse moves over an image. Users can embed images and links to their visualizations in their Web sites or blogs, just as they can embed YouTube videos.

The importance of e-Science development is illustrated by the fact that the Dutch government has declared that the underlying infrastructure of the country’s Gigaport project - SURFnet - will be seen as a national infrastructure project and be regulated and funded accordingly (no longer a science project - which often depends on ‘handouts’ on a year-by-year basis). This will certainly spearhead the project into the wider community. The project has been lifted from its scientific cradle into the broader Dutch community.

Gigaport and SURFnet

GigaPort consists of two interrelated sub-projects, GigaPort-Network (managed by SURFnet, the Netherlands’ research and education network) and GigaPort-Applications (managed by Telematica Institute). Within the context of GigaPort-Network a highly advanced research communications network is being developed with super-fast connections across the Netherlands and Europe and to North America and Asia. GigaPort-Applications offers the Dutch academic and business community the opportunity to carry out large-scale research into new applications for the next generation of the electronic highway.

Other countries, including the USA, need to be able to craft national policies that transcend the silos of science, telecoms, healthcare, education and so on. True whole-of-government policies are required to break through these silos. Given the scale and scope of the required effort, only governments can provide the level of leadership needed to get us there. The benefits of this initiative do not accrue to any one private entity, so no private entity will have the incentive to get the job done.

Interestingly, there is already a significant amount of international cooperation and collaboration taking place. However, in countries like the USA it seems to be far more difficult to also establish a more cohesive and collaborative national approach.

The power of citizen science has also spread to China. The Economist predicts at least one entirely new species of bird will be discovered in China in 2009, because China now has an active, amateur, bird-watching community.

Citizens e-Science

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