>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
>> Our final speaker before break is Geoff Haines-Stiles, who has worked
on Innovative Science Media Project since 1978
when he was series director and senior producer
for Carl Sagan's landmark, an Emmy-winning COSMOS series.
He's here today to talk about The Crowd & The Cloud
and how citizen science has revolutionized scientific data.
Science by, for and with the people, how citizen, science
and mobile tech have revolutionized the collection, sharing
and use of scientific data.
Geoff, take it away.
>> Geoff Haines-Stiles: I was going to say,
and now for something completely different,
but every single talk has been completely different, so I won't say
and now for something completely different.
But thanks to the Library of Congress
for inviting us all along today.
And I've got some references from what we saw yesterday
that actually tie into some of the themes of this talk.
I've been a science producer since 1980.
It's taken me to the ends of the Earth, which is fortunate,
because in the Antarctic, they give you helmets
to cover your bald spot, so everything is good.
I'm here today to talk about The Crowd & The Cloud.
My collaborators on that project are Waleed Abdalati,
a former NASA Chief Scientist.
You'll see him in a video clip in a moment.
And my collaborator in life and work, Erna Akuginow,
who's in the front there.
Thank you, Erna.
Recent grandmother.
Congratulations.
And see, the Library of Congress congratulates you as well.
Isn't this great?
So as was said, I've had a great time working with some
of the most celebrated scientists in the country,
and also comedians like Lily Tomlin.
What I hadn't been aware of until I was walking around yesterday is
that the Library of Congress actually has a great collection
of Alan Lomax memorabilia.
I've worked with him on a series called American Patchwork
about roots music.
The Crowd & The Cloud, funded by the National Science Foundation,
is designed to increase the visibility, credibility
and participation in citizen science.
Now, how many people in the audience could define citizen science
at a cocktail party?
That's about five or six people out of a couple hundred.
So that's one of the reasons that we decided
that we should try and do this series.
Citizen science is definitely a coming trend.
You'll hear from some of the citizen scientists yourselves.
These are some of the words that have been used
to define citizen science over the past few years.
You'll see cyber is in a lot of them.
A lot of them have natural history environments
as part of the subject matter.
One of my favorite ones is nerds for nature,
and there's actually a citizen science project called nerds
for nature.
Another way of saying that, however, would be science for, by,
for and with the people that you may notice comes
from the Gettysburg Address, and again, Lincoln is a great presence
in the Library of Congress.
I was pleased to find that out yesterday.
We've created four one-hour programs that debuted
on public television this last spring.
I'm going to show you a large number of video clips, which accounts
for me trying to talk rather fast.
Crowdandcloud.org is where you can find all of the programs streaming
in realtime if what we show you is of interest.
Our premise is to try and turn viewers into doers.
Not just to have a good time watching a TV show,
but actually to be encouraged to become part
of the citizen science movement.
And it wouldn't be possible without collaboration with a number
of government agencies and NGOs and citizen science projects.
So this is how we begin the series,
and this is how we begin this presentation.
>> The Crowd & The Cloud is made possible by NSF,
the National Science Foundation, where discoveries begin.
[ Music ]
>> This is today's citizen science.
People pursuing their passions, and at the same time,
generating data that's useful for research.
>> I love surfing.
I love science.
And I get to go surfing for science.
>> Technology is a way to really get people outside
and to look more carefully at the natural world.
>> There are now more mobile phones on Earth than people on our planet.
And new technologies can help solve major challenges.
>> Every single data point has a human story.
>> Now communities can use science to tackle local problems.
>> The state doesn't come and say, you've got to clean this up.
So we started on the bucket brigade.
>> They're linking sensors and citizens to find solutions.
>> I'm learning about toxins.
I'm learning how to teach other people to do what I do
so they can do it for themselves.
>> It was a lonely disease.
But propellor sensors are going to revolutionize the asthma treatment.
>> Collaborating via the cloud, the crowd can save time,
save money and save lives.
We're surely smarter together.
I'm Waleed Abdalati, host of The Crowd & The Cloud.
I've studied Earth's ice sheets from satellites and aircraft.
And I was NASA Chief Scientist at the time
when curiosity landed on Mars.
So I know big data and big science.
But I'm also convinced
that citizen-generated data has an important role.
No longer is science something only done by professionals in labs.
No more is data just the property of corporations in government.
>> For years, you've watched science on public television.
Now you're invited to do science.
>> Geoff Haines-Stiles: Well, I hope you can see we've got a wide variety
of projects that we feature in the series, a wide variety
of folks who are involved.
Citizen science actually has a long history.
The background here is Thomas Jefferson's weather records dating
back to the 1770s.
And today's citizen science is looking
at whether 20,000 observers are recording daily precipitation
measurements, including one, at least it was there,
on the left-hand side, a rain gauge
in Michelle Obama's vegetable garden.
So these are contributing data that the National Weather Service uses
to update flash flood warnings.
History of the Christmas Bird Count goes back to 1900.
It's one of the longest running citizen science projects
in the United States.
But contemporary citizen science also includes the make of movements,
millennials, folks like the people that are part of public lab.
And this is a gratuitous shot just because it makes me think
of arcade fire on tour, but these are actually citizen scientists
flying balloons underneath kites
to document the BP oil spill off of Deepwater Horizon.
Contemporary citizen science also includes putting sensors,
microscopic sensors on surfboard fins to look at ocean acidification
and sea surface temperature.
So as we said, a great variety.
Trying to tie my presentation to the themes of this conference,
I'm going to talk about three different kinds
of data collection and sharing.
In some cases, it's a question of data that's putting communities
on the map and helping to solve problems.
And that's what this next little clip is about.
The West Oakland Environmental Indicator's Project, it was founded
to try to look at truck routes going through West Oakland
and how truck routes were corresponding to asthma attacks
in senior citizen centers and daycare centers.
They managed to get the truck routes that you saw in red replaced
by the truck routes in green by going out and counting trucks.
Not counting birds, counting trucks, and then going to city government
to get them to move the truck routes away
from the most heavily populated areas.
They've continued their work reaching out to kids,
trying to get kids excited about the new generation of sensors.
And this next little clip shows how excited the teams,
like in the project that Tom and Patrick showed you,
get when they're doing authentic research.
In this case, it's not an archive.
They're using their environment,
their community as the source of data.
>> When the students have been able to go out and walk
around the community and collect data and then observe things,
they understand the correlation between the data and the sources
of pollution that they're interested in.
>> This is called the dust tracker.
It measures how much dust
and particular matter there is in the air.
Particular matter is the little dust particles that we can't see.
The more cars pass by, the more particular matter there is.
And the less cars that pass by, the less there are.
>> So the air filter in there, there's a cartridge.
They can send that out and test particulars.
And they found that it's kinds of metals.
And most of those things are from the brakes,
from the wheels and from the tracks.
So if you think about metal, you're breathing it.
If it's a metal.
[ Inaudible ]
>> Because of the low cost sensors available and the smart phones
or their devices, the students can collect data
and immediately begin interpreting them.
>> In December, 2015, some of the students presented their findings
at the American Geophysical Union, which is one of the largest
and busiest gatherings
of professional earth and space scientists.
>> We come to AGU, like that's amazing.
Like I didn't really realize how big of a deal it was
until I started looking into it, and we have something to bring
to the table, just us high school students.
And people want to hear what we have to say.
And it's kind of exciting, like what I'm doing like really matters.
>> It does matter.
It does matter.
>> Yeah, it gives us hope, like we might change something,
you know, like a taste of art.
>> We sometimes frighten the statisticians
because they would prefer to have a little bit of perfectly pristine,
absolutely, you know, 100% data from a million dollar machine.
And we're saying, no, no, let's take this, you know, 200 dollar machine
and start making decisions based on it.
But the notion is that if you had, you know,
a 1 million dollar machine, you can do so much with that.
But if you have a million hundred dollar machines, all spewing data
into the cloud, turning it back to us in a direct feedback loop,
then we start to adjust behavior immediately.
>> Geoff Haines-Stiles: So the second category is citizen science.
I'm going to talk about where there is no data, where there seems
to be no agencies that are involved in gathering the data
as you might expect and sharing that.
This is an example from the second program,
which is called Citizens Plus Scientists,
of where a concerned citizen, Deb, you'll see her in the piece.
But because it's an edited segment, it doesn't have the name supers.
That's why the names are here at the beginning.
Was concerned about air pollution in her area,
resulting from oil and gas development.
She went to an NGO, Denny Larson's Bucket Brigade, captured data.
And you'll see a little bit about how data is captured.
And then shared that through the peer review process
with a big result in terms of state policy.
So it goes all the way from data collection to social good,
socially beneficial results.
>> It took right out a hundred double semi-loads
to get the rig out.
It was a triple rig.
You know, the traffic went from maybe 3
or 4 cars a week to like 50 a day.
Tons of dust on this county road.
They'd flare for months.
They'd light the flare, and the whole crick bottom would shake.
And so our house would just shake.
Lots of noise.
All the wildlife just took off.
There was spills and leaks.
And nobody cleans it up.
Nobody says anything or does anything.
There's no oversight.
The state doesn't come out and say, you've got to clean this up.
It's left to the people who are living there.
>> The first thing that happens is the sites are selected.
The citizen scientists are trained on-site by ourselves.
They've got a set number of samples that they can take.
So the samples are taken, literally taking, you know, a plastic bucket
and putting some stainless steel on it that will hold the sample bag.
It's like a loan.
So the bucket is the body, the bag is the loan, and then there's a pump
which serves as your diaphragm, which pumps the air out,
creating negative pressure, opening the bag and bringing in air
so it can be sealed and sent to the lab for testing.
And they process it immediately.
>> Bucket brigade techniques have been reviewed by the EPA
and have been found to be useful in capturing data
where government sensors are lacking.
>> I was shocked.
I didn't think we'd find much.
And we found emissions off the freaking charts.
>> We found that many of the samples exceeded those standards.
Some for benzene were something like 10,000 times above the standard.
>> Many of the toxic chemicals that are known to cause cancer
that we found in this report were, in some cases, hundreds.
In other cases, thousands.
And in one case, 22 million times over the EPA cancer risk.
>> These are enormous releases.
Many of these components are neurotoxins.
At high concentrations, they can actually cause coma.
But at later concentrations, they tend to reduce brain function.
The long-term effects, the biggest one is cancer.
Because several of these are known human carcinogens.
>> So when we started doing the Bucket Brigade, this five,
six state Bucket Brigade, we didn't intend
on doing the peer-reviewed article.
We were just going to do the report.
>> I became involved in the fracking study when the groups
that had coordinated the community-based activities
approached me for assistance doing the statistical analysis
of the data, writing up the publication,
and getting it published in a peer-reviewed journal.
And whenever there is this kind of study,
having a peer-reviewed publication is sort
of the good housekeeping seal of legitimacy of a study.
>> What happens with citizen science is everybody disses it.
So the peer-reviewed article was extremely important
because it gave validity to citizen science.
>> I think that's why we got taken so seriously,
that our journal article had been published,
and this is what academic scientists and doctors were saying
about the extreme hazard from oil and gas development.
And there was widespread coverage across the U.S.
and actually globally of both the peer-reviewed study and the report.
And it had a major impact.
>> I think the greatest influence
from the warning signs report was for the ban in New York.
>> Our fracking study was waved by the commissioner of health
when he made the announcement that the governor
of New York was banning fracking.
>> Geoff Haines-Stiles: So the last genre of citizen science I'm going
to talk about is really more like crowd sourcing.
And this is where there's so much data, rather than the lack of data
in the case of fracking
or the public lab work, the Deepwater Horizon.
There is so much data coming out of research lab
that you can crowd source it much faster than the work could be done
by researchers themselves.
So this story is about the folks up at Cornell who are looking to see
if they can figure out the causes of Alzheimer's.
And they think it's reduced blood flow in the brain.
They experiment on mice.
They take videos of mouse brains.
And they then have the problem that it takes them a week
to capture the data, but a year to analyze it.
So they've turned to the crowd.
They've borrowed from or adapted examples
from successful gamified citizen science projects,
including the NASA Stardust Mission,
where 30,000 people playing a game were essentially able to find traces
of interstellar particles, and EyeWire,
which is looking at neurons in the brain.
Putting this together, they were able to borrow from all
of the lessons of web games in terms of having leader boards,
competition, fighting to have your name up there
on the top of the leader board.
And this is how a citizen science project was demoed
in a retirement community in Florida playing the store catcher's game.
You can see the excitement that these senior citizens got
from trying to help speed up Alzheimer's research.
[ Music ]
>> In late 2016, EyesOnALZ released its Stall Catchers game based
on the Stardust Interface.
The public was invited to help crowd source the analysis
of blocked blood vessels.
Some of the first players were in Central Florida.
They were retirees who had chosen the warm climate
in a community with plenty to do.
>> How many of you have family, friends, somebody close to you
that either has or did have Alzheimer's, or you have it?
Just about everybody, huh?
If only the scientists work on it, it might take as much as 30 years.
And for most of us, that's not going be a big benefit.
This is what the game looks like.
And you can get it on your phone, your tablet, your laptop.
>> Does the game change every day?
>> Yes, yes, they keep going.
They keep putting you through.
>> What do you think?
>> Oh, yeah, yeah.
>> How many think that it's flowing?
How many think it's stalled?
Shall we find out?
>> Yes.
>> Well, try Stall then, okay?
I've got 402 points.
Thank you very much.
There we go.
We're climbing.
We're climbing.
Every time we find a stalled one
that is really stalled, we are helping big time.
>> One of the things that I like about this research is
that we can help my mother's generation, but I'm 64.
And, you know, while I want to help my mom,
this is going to help, I call kids, my age.
>> EyesOnALZ will keep on refining its game play interface.
But its greatest impact on Alzheimer's research will come
from the limitless power of the crowd.
>> Geoff Haines-Stiles: So one of the common questions
about citizen science is the data quality reliable enough?
And the folks behind the EyesOnALZ project worked on that,
and they have been able to find that relative
to laboratory grade research, the crowd is doing very well.
Originally, they thought they would have to have 20 members
of the crowd to validate each result.
They've now gone down to 7 to 8 people, looking at each piece
of data to get quality results.
So data quality is often raised about citizen science.
The quality of many citizen science projects has been demonstrated
in statistics that I think any of you would find convincing.
While our series was on the air back in April and May
and PBS stations will be rerunning it on into the next couple of years,
but just last weekend, we did a global catch-a-thon,
modeled on the sort of open street map map-a-thons
in which you give people pizza, have them get together
to do a mapping of streets.
This time, EyesOnALZ coordinated a global effort,
22 teams in 6 different continents
on 6 different continents playing a game within an hour to see
who could actually code the largest number of stalls.
And you can see some of the people there.
Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, China, Brazil,
all around the world people were online playing this game
when we did a live zoom hangout to document that.
The winners were actually done in Chile.
You can see that they annotated 1,955 examples of brain science,
and then they celebrated and everybody got to share in that.
Citizen science has, in fact, become a global phenomenon
with citizen science associations in Australia,
and also in Europe being very strong.
Some of the apps developed in Spain are actually now being used here
in the United States as well.
This is called mosquito alert with the concern about Zika.
Anything that citizens can do to report the areas
in which there is a breeding site for mosquitoes is very important.
This little video just shows you that these are the sites
of traditional locations of live traps.
But they're fairly limited.
This is the number of citizen science reports
that came in in Spain.
So my time is up.
Coffee break is looming.
I'm going to just zip over the next few things just to say
that there is an NSF project using $6 microscopes to attach
to the smart phones that are also part
of today's citizen science revolution.
And I'm skipping over that and ending here by saying
that it's a revolution that is happening, it's powered by people,
it is really answering concerns that communities and citizens have.
But it's using the tools of science, it's generating data
from the environment, analyzing it, collaborating with scientists,
and then delivering back solutions that work.
So citizens plus sensors working for solutions,
that's a pretty good summary of what today's citizen science is.
And Erna and I will be happy to talk to anybody over the break about any
of the things we've just said.
So thanks very much Library of Congress for putting this on.
Delighted to be here.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.
For more infomation >> David Shapiro - Democratic candidate for Florida's 16th congressional district - Duration: 6:13. 
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét