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Citizen Science and Grid Computing

Posted by kdawson on from the greyware-network dept.

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."

16 of 69 comments (clear)

  1. Wiki? by ttapper04 · · Score: 3, Interesting

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

  2. Wow by moogied · · Score: 4, Funny
    The economist, a magazine respected all around the world, has just published an article that concludes: "Two heads are better then one."

    Hmph..

    --
    So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
  3. games by enjahova · · Score: 4, Informative

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

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

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

    --
    "how can they call it a MINE if everything here is THEIRS?!?!" -Straight Jacket
  4. This is only common sense by east+coast · · Score: 2, Funny

    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.

    --
    Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
  5. Micropayments for human labor to prevent boredom? by compumike · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  6. My problem with grid computing by schnikies79 · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

    --
    Gone!
    1. Re:My problem with grid computing by Charcharodon · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:My problem with grid computing by EMeta · · Score: 3, Funny

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

  7. Every project you can participate in right now by kpearson · · Score: 2, Informative

    is listed on my site: http://distributedcomputing.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.

  8. Re:Micropayments for human labor to prevent boredo by Yetihehe · · Score: 2, Informative

    [...] 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 redundancy. When 10 users agree and one misses this agreement most times, he is considered not trustworthy and therefore ignored and not payed.
    --
    Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
  9. Grid computing != Distributed computing by edsousa · · Score: 5, Informative
    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
  10. Re:DP by dpf_donovan · · Score: 2, Informative

    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 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. DP has also been producing HTML, DJVU, and LaTeX editions of projects (including illustrations) for many years. We are not tied to plain text, although we do produce it as a minimum for our target repository, Project Gutenberg.

    Markup for bold and italics is the same as HTML, and markups exist for and are used to indicate marginal notes, footnotes, and the like. You are welcome to argue that a more complex markup is necessary, but considering the amount of outdated information in your comments here, you may wish to stop by and update your knowledge of the the state of the site. We'll happily welcome you back if you do.

    D. Garcia
    SysAdm - Distributed Proofreaders.

  11. Shameless self promotion of my PhD research by bcg · · Score: 2, Interesting
    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 computing.

    The focus has been on making distributed computing projects as easy to start as a BitTorrent swarm. After spending some quality time with both BOINC and Condor I can assure you that getting a project going from scratch, can be a non-trivial exercise.

    Here's a paper if anyone is interested: Enabling grassroots distributed computing with CompTorrent

  12. Re:SETI... by OriginalArlen · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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 admittedly hypnotic display chugging away.

    --

    Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
  13. Re:SETI... by ShakaUVM · · Score: 2, Informative

    SETI?

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

    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 useful for a long time now.

  14. Re:DP by bgalbrecht · · Score: 2, Informative

    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 versions submitted to Project Gutenberg were plain-text.

    At the time you were volunteering, PG was primarily a repository of only plain-text documents. These days, in a large part due to the influence of volunteers at DP, nearly every new text submitted to PG has an HTML edition, some are submitted to PG in PG-TEI, which is Project Gutenberg's draft/proposed XML vocabulary based on the Text Encoding Initiative XML format, which can be transformed into many formats including plain text and HTML.