Citizen Science and Grid Computing

japonicus writes "The Economist has an article summarizing the current state of distributed computing (think SETI@home and its ilk), which suggests that distributed-human projects are going to be the next big thing. (We discussed one such project, the Galaxy Zoo, a few months back.) The distributed-computing platform BOINC is about to expand to human processing. Distributed proofreaders have been a longstanding success (yet inexplicably failed to get even a mention in the article); but there are a lot of other projects waiting in the wings."

Wiki?

I wonder if they could borrow ideas from the wiki community.

Business Nervous System

That'll have to be first. Not impossible to do, but given the state of the IT infrastructures I've seen unlikely for a while.

 

Wow

The economist, a magazine respected all around the world, has just published an article that concludes: "Two heads are better then one."

Hmph..

games

ESP Game:
http://www.espgame.org/ [espgame.org]

More info:
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/09/more_on_google_image_labeler.html [oreilly.com]

Very interesting video:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143 [google.com]

This is only common sense

The Economist has an article summarizing the current state of distributed computing (think SETI@home and its ilk), which suggests that distributed-human projects are going to be the next big thing
 
After all, just look at BotNets. How much more insight do we need than that?
 
If only Joe Sixpack (who leaves his computer on 24/7 even tho he only uses it about a half hour per day) would understand that every clock cycle is sacred, every clock cycle is great...
 
If only.

Joe is taking part in distributed computing !

If only Joe Sixpack (who leaves his computer on 24/7 even tho he only uses it about a half hour per day) would understand that every clock cycle is sacred, every clock cycle is great...

Don't worry : Joe Sixpack is taking part in distributed computing. Main

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Dude, come on, what are you? Nine years old? Perhaps you're just trolling. Kudos. In the event you're not, let me clarify for you. Windows XP as well as Windows 2000/2003 have excellent kernels that keep them chugging away. Vista? Not so much.

Also, if yo

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While I commend your statement I wouldn't bother feeding the trolls.

But yeah, I work with over 600 Windows 2000 and XP machines everyday. This idea that you need to constantly reboot or that BSODs are common problems is just bullshit. I can't remember the

Micropayments for human labor to prevent boredom?

Sure, there are tasks that computers can't do so well at the moment, where giving the work parcels to humans would make the most sense. But can you imagine what micropayments might allow? It would enable a consistent set of trained, motivated workers to be stable over time, and dependable enough to use this kind of network for important activities.

Ultimately, humans get bored and computers don't. But humans can be delayed from boredom quite a bit by financial compensation.

--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation. [nerdkits.com]

Re:Micropayments for human labor to prevent boredo

But can you imagine what micropayments might allow?

Abuse, fraud and theft?

It would enable a consistent set of trained, motivated workers to be stable over time, and dependable enough to use this kind of network for important activities.

I tend to agree with you, but you do have to figure out how to combat fraudulent activities. After all, most of these are like "pick the picture that most matches foo" or whatever but if someone writes a bot to randomly click on a

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[...] but if someone writes a bot to randomly click on a picture to get micropayments? Not so good because not only were you cheated, but now you have a bunch of wrong data. How do you detect fraud in such a system?

Did you RTFA? It's obvious: with redundan

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Exactly. Amazon's Mechanical Turk system already does this.

My problem with grid computing

The only problem I have with the current way of grid-based computing is that it cost me a decent amount over the year. I have to leave my PC('s) on, which burns up power that could otherwise be saved.

I know several slashdotters leave their computers on 24/7, but I don't. It's akin to leaving a light-bulb on overnight, or leaving the fridge door open. I do have a computer I leave on overnight when it's downloading, but it's a 5headless 00mhz p3 with 256mb ram and it's promptly shut down until I need to download again.

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Thats supposed to a headless 500mhz p3

Re:My problem with grid computing

That's funny your comment about power usage, because that's exactly how one of the IT guys got found out by management. He was running seti@home during the night on all the work stations and servers. Finance noticed a jump in the power bill about the same time this guy was brought in to work in their IT section. He was racking up quite a few points for the 3 months or so he was getting away with it.

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I have a crazy idea for you. Install it, and don't change your habits. It is fine to turn a computer using BOINC off at night. Most applications checkpoint every 5 minutes or so, which means you might lose 5 minutes of work by turning it off. Hardly an

Re:My problem with grid computing

But now it is winter, so my computer is at worst a badly directed space heater.

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Depending on how you heat your house and how your electricity is generated, it's also an inefficient space heater. I'd much rather use a primary energy source to heat my home than incur the 50% efficiency loss by converting the primary source into electric

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Say is costs 10 cents a kilowatt hour for energy, your PC draws 200 watts on average, and it's on eight hours per day.

That's 58 dollars a year, saving about 117 by turning if off at night.

The expansion and contraction from the heating and cooling cycles ru

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I've been running PC's for 12 years. The only part I have ever had fail is a hard drive. I keep hardware an average of 4 years.

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I know several slashdotters leave their computers on 24/7, but I don't. It's akin to leaving a light-bulb on overnight, or leaving the fridge door open. I do have a computer I leave on overnight when it's downloading, but it's a 5headless 00mhz p3 with 256

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I'm well aware of this, thats why it's never on except when download a torrent. It's only fired up once or twice a month and only for a few hrs. I really don't download much.

This has nothing to do my being green, it's about saving money.

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This thread is long dead but I thought I would mention that I ditched the p3.

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Who said scientific progress is free? Maybe you should quit paying taxes too, some of them might end up funding research.

'Citizen' science

The Economist coined that out of their ass? Seriously, the current acception of 'citizen' is a person taken as subject to the laws of a specific government. What does *that* has to do with voluntary distributed computing? Nothing! They just assume voluntar

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My thought exactly. Lets assume they mean more of a society science, or social science in that the society is contributing to science. I'm sorry all you SETI@home loving people but it isn't "citizen science" in the sense that you have a claim on the scienc

mcgrew's rule #ff387Y

As soon as you see some asshat saying in print or especially on the internet that something is "the next big thing" you can bet your left nut it isn't.

-mcgrew [slashdot.org]

Need a flock

You can always pickup a jiggit at http://www.thesheepmarket.com/ [thesheepmarket.com].

About : http://users.design.ucla.edu/~akoblin/work/thesheepmarket/ [ucla.edu]
Created with : http://www.processing.org/ [processing.org], http://www.mturk.com/mturk/ [mturk.com]

Every project you can participate in right now

is listed on my site: http://distributedcomputing.info/ [distribute...uting.info] . If you leave your computer on all the time and it isn't doing anything useful when you aren't using it, please look through these projects and pick one or more to contribute to.

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Recently, I've started thinking about a distributed computing project for language analysis... some statistical analyses and machine learning could very well be implemented in this way, especially if we use Google (with a limited number of searches per day

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I bought a PS3 to do development using a Cell processor, and leave it on to run Folding@Home when I'm not using it. It tears through work units. (Note: I don't need a lecture on energy usage from anyone. I offset my home carbon emissions even though I don'

DP

Distributed proofreaders have been a longstanding success (yet inexplicably failed to get even a mention in the article)

Maybe because it's a totally amateur effort?

I volunteered for DP for a few months. I got buggy TIFFs that my web browser couldn't deal

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Maybe because it's a totally amateur effort?

"All-volunteer" is not the same thing as "totally amateur." A number of our volunteers work in library science, proofreading, or other directly related fields.

I volunteered for DP for a few months. I got buggy TIFFs that my web browser couldn't deal with, so I sometimes had to work outside the DP proofing environment, which was a pain. (My suggestion that they switch to a more portable format, such as PNG, fell on deaf ears.) And they're still stuck on the idea that plain text is a universal format. There was no good way to indicate marginal notes. Both boldface and italic are indicated by all caps. And equations were managed with a subset of LaTex which I'm sure I mangled because I didn't have a LaTex interpreter to test it on in fact, the DP instructions didn't even mention that it was LaTex.

It sound like you last visited DP a long time ago. DP has been standardized on PNG as thei

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"All-volunteer" is not the same thing as "totally amateur." A number of our volunteers work in library science, proofreading, or other directly related fields.

Never said it was. In this kind of context, I think you'll find "amateur" usually means the opposite of "professional". And in this context "professional" doesn't mean "paid", it means "knows what they're doing".

It sound like you last visited DP a long time ago. DP has been standardized on PNG as their page image format almost since the site's inception 7 years ago, though we do allow jpg as an alternative. TIFF has never been an official format there.

I don't know what to tell you. I was invol

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I don't know what to tell you. I was involved in 2003, and at that time I used a sort of web proofreading tool that used TIFF. Perhaps that was a feature of the particular tool.

Ah, that may have been the long-obsolete Windows-based client "PRTK."

All the "recently finished" links on the front page are broken not the best way to persuade folks you're not amateurs.

Those offsite links are valid, but not until after PG does its nightly cataloging run which places files in the correct locations on their server(s). Why they don't move files into p

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Those offsite links are valid, but not until after PG does its nightly cataloging run which places files in the correct locations on their server(s). Why they don't move files into place immediately on posting a text is beyond me, since it should be trivial from a technical standpoint, but since I don't volunteer for them directly, I can't respond to that.

Neither "it's not our fault" or "they should work" is more than a silly excuse. If this were my website, I'd work with the other website to make sure the links worked. If that didn't work out, I'd take down the links. Proudly displaying links that don't w

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As others have mentioned, you must have volunteered at DP a very long time ago because ALL of your objections to our work are no longer valid. The only complaint of yours that was valid when I started volunteering there 3.5 years ago was that DP's final ve

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I just took a look at the DP site. As I've noticed in another post, not that much has changed.

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"Saying it's so doesn't make it true?" How does that even apply here? I didn't just make a claim, I pointed out some severe limitations in the "guidelines" that haven't changed since I was a volunteer. True there have been some improvements (not using ALL

prior art

Maybe once these projects pick up speed, people will get together and start working out of a common workplace to increase efficiency !
Hmmm... but then of course they'll need a big building to fit everyone, some form of financing, cubicles....

Hey... wa

Grid computing != Distributed computing

Grid computing is when you request resources to run your app. Projects like SETI@home use a different approach: you pull a task, instead of arbitrarily offering your computing resources.

IBM defines grid computing as "the ability, using a set of open standards and protocols, to gain access to applications and data, processing power, storage capacity and a vast array of other computing resources over the Internet.

in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_Computing [wikipedia.org]

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Grid computing and distributed computing are related, but not the same. With distributed computing, the focus is mainly on getting large numbers of machines that are functionally the same in some way (e.g. large numbers of SETI@home processing units). With

Shameless self promotion of my PhD research

Hi,

This is something that I have had an interest in for the last few years. As such, a large part of my thesis has been developing "CompTorrent". It is a computing platform that has borrowed some ideas from BitTorrent and combined them with distributed c

We tried this - no funding

http://inchorus.com/ [inchorus.com] was a startup that tried to do exactly this (think Amazon Mechanical Turk, but distributed). Great fun, lots of projects... no seed funding. :)

http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9676000-2.html [webware.com] says what we tried to do.

Great idea... but not without drawbacks

TANSTAAFL. It's ironic that people running, e.g. ClimatePrediction are simultaneously helping to change the climate. Each PC does not generate much heat, but several million of them certainly do - especially if left on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week as many

SETI...

SETI was the first to really harness this concept in a useful way, and it was very useful to prove the viability for distributed computing. However, I think the computing power would be better used for medical research, such as Rosetta and World Community

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Something I have pondered... How do you know it's SETI is useful? I agree there a ton of computers out there crunching tons of number, but who really knows how useful it is? However, the Medical research seems more promising as it would produce tangibl

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The summary's right - Distributed Proofreaders was well before SETI and, having contributed to both, I can confidently state the my mental cycles contribution to PGDP was FAR more personally satisfying than the hours spent staring at SETI@Home's admittedl

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SETI?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed.net [wikipedia.org]

The RC5 contest, 10 years ago, was the first one to harness the concept and prove the validity. I know Slashdot loves using phrases like "the next big thing", but Grid computing has been around and been usef

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I still run SETI for old time's sake, albeit at low priority (along with SZATKI and ABC) at 100, whereas Einstein and Rosetta are at 200 and World Community Grid has the lion's share of CPU cycles at 400, so for my part it's mostly biology and astronomy.