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In this talk, David Anderson will review how Citizen Cyberscience has progressed over the last ten years, from simple beginnings as “screensaver computing” to online communities involving millions of volunteers who help scientists with sophisticated data analysis, sometimes debug the scientists’ software, and occasionally make significant scientific discoveries.
He will discuss the new wave of ‘volunteer thinking’ projects, where volunteers contribute their own time and effort as well as that of their computer. Examples include projects like Stardust@Home, where volunteers scan microscopic images for elusive tracks of interstellar material, as well as online computer games that challenge players to solve tough research problems, such as the protein folding game Foldit.
He will describe ongoing activities to stimulate more scientists to use volunteer computing, both in terms of making the software more accessible and easy to implement, and in terms of training activities targeting regions of the world, such as Asia, where citizen cyberscience is not yet widely used.
Dr. David P. Anderson received an MA in Mathematics and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. From 1985 to 1992 he served on the faculty of the U.C. Berkeley Computer Science Department. His research areas include volunteer computing, distributed systems, operating systems, realtime and multimedia systems, computer graphics, and computer music.
Since 1998 he has directed SETI@home, a pioneering volunteer computing project. He leads the BOINC project, which develops widely-used middleware for volunteer computing. He is also involved in technology for distributed thinking and for large-scale web-based training and education.
In this talk, Tom Smith will describe the origins and the impact of the malariacontrol.net project, which is an application that makes use of network computing for stochastic modelling of the clinical epidemiology and natural history of Plasmodium falciparum malaria.
He will explain how, with assistance for the Africa@home project, it was possible to scale up an application running in-house on a few dozen computers to a computing engine involving tens of thousands of volunteer computers.
He will also outline how the results from the simulations being carried out by the volunteers are already having practical impact on decision-makers in Africa about how to combat malaria most effectively.
Finally, he will describe some of the other areas where he sees potential for both volunteer computing and volunteer thinking solutions to have significant impacts on disease control in Africa, and how African scientists can take a lead role in making this happen.
Professor Thomas Smith heads the Biostatistics and Computational Sciences Unit at the Swiss Tropical Institute. After training in genetics and medical statistics he has worked in the field of infectious disease epidemiology for 25 years including a period of 4 years in Papua New Guinea (PNG), and 18 years at STI, where his research has focused on the epidemiology of malaria. His particular interests are in the design and analysis of observational field studies and of intervention trials.
He has worked on various studies of vaccines, chemotherapy and vector control, mainly in PNG, Tanzania, and Ghana. Currently his main activity is the simulation modeling of the epidemiology and control of malaria, with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
In this talk, Francisco Fernandez de Vega will describe some of the work being done at Extremadura to make volunteer computing even more accessible, both to individual volunteers and to organizations that want to contribute to worthy science projects, with a special focus on his ongoing partnerships with Latin American institutions.
Extremadura@home is a new kind of account manager in which the choice of projects is a group decision. It is targeted at Spanish computer owners but is open to everyone. Jarifa is designed for situations where an organization wishes to allow time on computers it manages to be divided among a set of volunteer computing projects by a designated allocator. It takes volunteer computing to the organizational level, and is well-suited for campuses.
The speaker will give examples of use of these sorts of tools, and will comment on the opportunities in Latin America for exploiting volunteer computing, and more generally citizen cyberscience.
In this talk, Bill Bovermann will describe some of the research that has been supported through IBM’s philanthropic World Community Grid initiative, which aims to create the world's largest public computing grid to tackle projects that benefit humanity.
World Community Grid provides a service to public and not-for-profit organizations to help them prepare and run computational challenges in humanitarian research, using volunteer computing. Several of the projects World Community Grid supports have been initiated by researchers in developing countries, and might otherwise not have been completed due to the high cost of the computer infrastructure required.
The speaker will describe briefly some examples of projects supported by World Community Grid, such as ‘FightAIDS@home’, ‘Nutrtious Rice for the World’ and ‘Discovering Dengue Drugs’, and outline of the scientific results that have been obtained from them. He will also describe how World Community Grid has played an active role in initiatives like Africa@home, and the future synergies he sees between World Community Grid and the Citizen Cyberscience Centre.
Mr. Bovermann is an Executive Project Manager in IBM’s Application Services Delivery Excellence group. This group is responsible for ensuring that complex integration projects are completed on time, on budget, with a high level of customer satisfaction.
Mr. Bovermann has over 30 years of Information Technology experience at financial, manufacturing, and petrochemical institutions. He has extensive project management, system integration, and application development experience using state-of-the-art and legacy technologies. Mr. Bovermann is certified as a Sr. Project Manager by both the Project Management Institute (PMI) and IBM. In addition, he is degreed from New Mexico State University, USA. At present, Mr. Bovermann manages two of IBM premier philanthropic projects: World Community Grid and SME Toolkit. In this role, he is responsible for all duties from day-to-day management to long range planning plus providing oversight to 20+ people.