TUNA Lunch Talk:

Tiha von Ghyczy

UVA Darden School of Business

Citizen Science and NRAO

July 26

12:10PM, Room 230, NRAO, Edgemont Road

Abstract:

IDx is a Charlottesville, VA, based start-up company dedicated to identifying, generating and developing ideas with the potential of accelerating and enriching the processes which transform observations into data, data into information, information into knowledge, knowledge into communication and communication into changes in policy and behavior. No less ambitiously but perhaps more succinctly, it may be said that we seek to realize the early ideals giving rise to the creation of the Internet with the latest technologies and the most current insights into how people collaborate most productively across barriers of distance, culture, institutional and disciplinary boundaries. Of special interest among the few areas currently under active investigation at IDx is the wide variety of projects commonly (and misleadingly) referred as "crowd sourcing." This in itself is clearly not a new idea. Indeed, the few well publicized projects of this nature (e.g. Galaxy Zoo, FoldIt, predictive algorithm for NetFlix) are merely the tip of an iceberg most of which is under water in more than a metaphorical sense due to fragmentation of effort, lack of resources and insufficient attention to the fundamentally social nature of the problem of how to create and sustain public interest. Our aim is to overcome these obstacles. Following a presentation outlining our ideas on what we refer to as "socio-ware", we wish discuss possible projects with NRAO staff. Our suggestion would be to identify one or two pilot projects where we could, in relatively little time, develop a proof of concept. Lacking in knowledge about NRAO's most pressing needs, we could well imagine a redesign of e.g., the Pulsar Search Collaboratory as a potential pilot: what does it take to increase participation by a factor of 10? Or 100?