“Digital Malaysia is the government agency tasked with developing Malaysia as a digital nation towards 2020. One of its 8 current major initiatives is in using crowdsourcing to give work and opportunities to the least advantaged 40% of the population. The overall strategic framework is to focus on both competitiveness and social equity and inclusiveness. This has lead to the idea of what they call ‘microsourcing’ as a way of providing incremental revenue to the poor. The target is households of incomes less than RM2,300 (US$750) per month, including homemakers, retirees, unemployed,disabled, prison inmates”
What’s In Your Gut? Ask Citizen Science | Co.Exist
The American Gut Project is trying to create a better picture of the human “microbiome.” Give it some of your info, and they’ll tell you a lot about all the bugs that make up your digestive system and how they’re affecting your health.
Predicting Postpartum Changes in Emotion and Behavior via Social Media | Follow the Crowd
Analysis of Twitter posts predicted postpartum depression with up to 80% accuracy using a mathematical model based on factors such as volume of activity, ego-centric network characteristics, emotion, and linguistic styles.
(via ibmsocialbiz)
How crowd-sourced work needs to change
The current system for “crowd work” leads to diminishing pay and skills for simply completing small, homogenous tasks:
A better system would draw on knowledge of organizational principles and distributed computing to support complex, creative and interdependent work:
PressureNet App Feeds Scientists Atmospheric Data from Thousands of Smartphones | MIT Technology Review
An Android app that measures atmospheric pressure is now feeding that distributed data to scientists working on better ways to predict the weather.
The app, called PressureNet, highlights the potential of distributed sensing using mobile devices and shows how the sophisticated sensors found in modern smartphones could be harnessed for research. It was launched in late 2011 By Jacob Sheehy, a software developer for Flighthub.com, and Phil Jones, an independent Web designer, who became friends while studying at Concordia University in Montreal.
Swype Beta Now Updates in Real-time With Living Language Crowd-sourcing Tech – Droid Life
If users choose to opt-in, this new technology, Swype’s dictionary will learn in real-time, by enabling crowd-sourced up-to-date words and phrases to appear as options while typing. You’ll begin to see trending words and phrases that other Swypers have been using regularly.
Along with Living Language, Swype also includes a feature called Smart Editor, which analyzes entire sentences, flagging potential errors that you may not have noticed.
What Would You Do With 600,000 Years of Computing Power? « A Smarter Planet Blog
Juan Hindo, Program Manager, Citizenship & Corporate Affairs, IBM
By Juan Hindo
Today, World Community Grid celebrates eight years of bringing together volunteers from around the world to support humanitarian research. World Community Grid taps the spare computational power of computers volunteered by the general public and provides it – free of charge – to scientists who might not otherwise have access to the intensive computing power they require for timely, humanitarian research.
In eight years, our volunteers have provided research scientists with the equivalent of more than 600,000 years of computing power to seek cures and new treatments for many diseases, identify clean sources of energy and seek to improve water quality. These projects have yielded more than 30 peer-reviewed scientific papers – industry recognition of scientific research being advanced by World Community Grid.
Continue reading at Citizen IBM.
Help End Homelessness With This Simple Survey App
According to National Alliance to End Homelessness report The State of Homelessness in America 2012, the estimated number of homeless people in the United States was 636,017 at the end last year. That’s a 1% decrease between 2009 and 2011, but there’s still cause for concern — economic and demographic indicators show that homelessness might escalate over the next few years.
The 100,000 Homes Campaign is trying to change that with its new mobile-friendly app, Homeless Connector. The campaign, which is a national movement to find permanent homes for 100,000 chronically homeless individuals and families by July 2014, created the app to empower people around the country to help end homelessness.
Homeless Connector is a web-based smartphone version of 100,000 Homes’ “Vulnerability Index,” a survey that records data regarding the age, health, institutional history (i.e., military, hospital, jail, prison), and length of homelessness of homeless Americans.
Mobile app enables crowdsourced monitoring of local water sources
Much the way Creek Watch lets citizens take part in monitoring the local watershed, so mWater allows those in the developing world to help keep tabs on local water sources. READ MORE…
Crowdsourced AI: the Low-Wage Knowledge Work of the Future
As both Artificial Intelligence and Robotics become more “real,” we have developed a more practical understanding of these technologies’ limitation. What is striking is that, contrary to what most people believe, the most “irreplaceable” human work tends to come at the lower end of the wage/status scale. Robots are better at surgery than they are at janitorial work, AI is better at legal scholarship and journalism than it is at customer service.
Enter Chorus, a crowdsourced chat platform
When people talk to the new crowd-powered chat system, called Chorus, using an instant messaging window, they get an experience practically indistinguishable from chatting with a single real person. Yet behind the scenes, each response is the result of tens of people paid a few cents to perform small tasks: including suggesting possible replies and voting for the best suggestions submitted by other workers…
Chorus does that with three simple types of task. First, any new chat updates from the human user are passed along to many crowd workers, who are asked to suggest a reply. Those suggestions are then voted on by crowd workers to determine the one that will be sent back. A final mechanism creates a kind of working memory that ensures that Chorus’s replies reflect the history of the conversation so far, crucial if it is to carry out long conversations—something that is a challenge for apps like Siri and even AI chatbots intended to showcase conversational skills.
For the working memory component, crowd members are asked to maintain a short running list of the eight most important snippets of information under discussion, to be used as a reference when workers suggest replies.
This is important, as to allow for the natural turnover of crowdsourcing workers. “A single person may not be around for the duration of the conversation—they come and go, and some may contribute more than others,” says Bigham.
Bigham says Chorus has the potential to be more than just a neat demonstration. “We definitely want to start embedding it into real systems,” he says. “Perhaps you could help someone with cognitive impairment by having a crowd as a personal assistant.” Another possibility is to combine Chorus with another system previously developed at Rochester, which has crowd workers collaborate to steer a robot. “Could you create a robot this way that can drive around and interact intelligently with humans?” asks Bigham.
(via Artificial Intelligence, Powered by Many Humans - Technology Review)
(via joshbyard)
Crowdsourced Map Tells Cyclists What Are Really The Best City Bike Routes - PSFK
‘Dynamic Connections,’ created as part of a BMW Guggenheim Lab collaboration, is a crowdsourced bike map of information for cyclists in Berlin. It was created in an attempt to tackle the problems with traditional, often outdated bike maps and enables cyclists to mark the routes they frequently ride on a Google-based map. Then they can answer a number of questions about that route regarding traffic flow, number of parked cars, visibility, topography, and the density of amenities along the route. The information is processed using an algorithm that designates the route bicycle-friendly or -unfriendly, and the route is marked on the map in either green or red.
Tapping aggregate smartphone data for new, community-level insights
A wealth of data is generated by smartphones around the globe every day, yet rarely is it tapped in aggregate form. The NextTrain app we profiled last year is perhaps one exception, but startup Behavio aims to take such efforts even further. Specifically, Behavio seeks to use the huge amount of data smartphones collect to identify patterns of behavior across society. READ MORE…
Thanks guys for your great Big Ideas for sustainable cities! Some of our favourites got included above.
- Joe
(via thisbigcity)
Voice analysis could help diagnose Parkinson’s, project seeking volunteers | The Verge
Applied mathematician and TED Fellow Max Little has been working on ways to diagnose Parkinson’s disease by analyzing voice recordings, but now he’s turning to the public for help. The Parkinson’s Voice Initiative, launched today at the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh, is seeking volunteers to submit their voices via a three-minute phone call that will help to refine the algorithms used in research led by Little.
