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We introduce Peekaboom, an entertaining web-based game that can help computers locate objects in images. People play the game because of its entertainment value, and as a side effect of them playing, we collect valuable image metadata, such as which pixels belong to which object in the image. The collected data could be applied towards constructing more accurate computer vision algorithms, which require massive amounts of training and testing data not currently available. Peekaboom has been played by thousands of people, some of whom have spent over 12 hours a day playing, and thus far has generated millions of data points. In addition to its purely utilitarian aspect, Peekaboom is an example of a new, emerging class of games, which not only bring people together for leisure purposes, but also exist to improve artificial intelligence. Such games appeal to a general audience, while providing answers to problems that computers cannot yet solve.

Monday, January 23, 2012 Computer Games for CrowdsourcingScientific Research Do you like computer games?If yes, here you have two options to play and at the same timecontribute to genetic and biotechnology research: phylo It looks like a game, but it is a tool to improve multiple sequencealignments of DNA regions that may be linked to various geneticdisorders. Sequence alignment is a way of identifying regions of similarity that may be consequence of functional, structural orevolutionary relationship between the sequences. This alignment isusually done with the aid of computer algorithms, however they do notguarantee a global optimization as it will take a prohibitively expensivecomputational power to achieve it.

Goals of the ShanghAI Lectures The ShanghAI Lectures project aims at making education and knowledge on cutting-edge scientific topics accessible to everyone exploring novel methods of knowledge transfer building a sustainable community of students and researchers in the area of Embodied Intelligence overcoming the complexity of a multi-cultural and interdisciplinary learning context bringing global teaching to a new level These lectures about Natural and Artificial Intelligence are held via videoconference at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, the University of Salford/MediaCityUK in the United Kingdom, Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, and about 12 other universities around the globe. Students from the participating universities work together on the exercises, using a powerful robotics simulator software.

Help scientists recover worldwide weather observations made by Royal Navy ships around the time of World War I. These transcriptions will contribute to climate model projections and improve a database of weather extremes. Historians will use your work to track past ship movements and the stories of the people on board.

Help solar scientists spot explosions on the Sun and track them across space to Earth. Your work will give astronauts an early warning if dangerous solar radiation is headed their way. And you could make a new scientific discovery.

You can help marine researchers understand what whales are saying. Listen to the large sound and find the small one that matches it best. Click 'Help' below for an interactive guide.

LHC@home is a platform for volunteers to help physicists develop and exploit particle accelerators like CERN's Large Hadron Collider, and to compare theory with experiment in the search for new fundamental particles. By contributing spare processing capacity on their home and laptop computers, volunteers may run simulations of beam dynamics and particle collisions in the LHC's giant detectors

Helping scientists in developing countries to access the power of internet-based volunteer computing and volunteer thinking.

The GalaxyZoo project invites collaborators to take part in an initiative to classify galaxies. By tapping the available time from thousands of gamers and avoiding the expense of labor-intensive non-specialty research, highly qualified scientists are able to focus on specialty tasks and tremendous efficiencies are achieved in terms of speed, results, and reduced research costs.

A real-time, online checklist program, eBird has revolutionized the way that the birding community reports and accesses information about birds. Launched in 2002 by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and National Audubon Society, eBird provides rich data sources for basic information on bird abundance and distribution at a variety of spatial and temporal scales. eBird's goal is to maximize the utility and accessibility of the vast numbers of bird observations made each year by recreational and professional bird watchers. It is amassing one of the largest and fastest growing biodiversity data resources in existence.

Milkyway@Home uses the BOINC platform to harness volunteered computing resources, creating a highly accurate three dimensional model of the Milky Way galaxy using data gathered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. This project enables research in both astroinformatics and computer science. In computer science, the project is investigating different optimization methods which are resilient to the fault-prone, heterogeneous and asynchronous nature of Internet computing; such as evolutionary and genetic algorithms, as well as asynchronous newton methods. While in astroinformatics, Milkyway@Home is generating highly accurate three dimensional models of the Sagittarius stream, which provides knowledge about how the Milky Way galaxy was formed and how tidal tails are created when galaxies merge.

In an effort to secure mass-collaboration, the company has launched a $7 million competition to reward talented minds for their potential contribution in perfecting the Personal Genome Machine sequencer that the company has developed. The machine relies on semi-conductor technology and has the capability of transforming chemical data into digital information. It is the first of its kind in the world and creative minds can enter the Grand Challenges Contest.

The Great Sunflower Project targets bee and gardening enthusiasts to help research on a large scale what wild bees are doing and what effects there are on polination of garden plants, crops and wild plants.