Today sees the launch of an innovative Citizen Science Project by Diamond Light Source, the UK’s national synchrotron science facility. The project uses a crowdsourcing model to call on people of all ages around the world to help speed up the analysis of the terabytes of data that Diamond generates every day. The first task set for citizen scientists is to spend a few minutes looking at a series of screens to identify viruses. More tasks will be set for other targets over the next three years. This will help train Artificial Intelligence systems (AI) and develop new ways of segmenting data, with the aim to automate the data segmentation processes. Doing this will dramatically speed up scientists’ ability to understand their research data in a matter of days rather than the current weeks, allowing for a faster path to understanding disease structures, and perhaps speeding up pathways to drug development.
Unveiled at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington DC, The Diamond “Science Scribbler – Virus Project”, is the first of its kind that members of the public can help with in such a big way. It is funded by the world’s biggest biomedical charity, the Wellcome Trust and being developed in collaboration with Zooniverse, the renowned citizen science web platform.
>Read more on the Diamond Light Source website
>Project: Science Scribbler: Virus Factory