We design and engineer biotic games in order to solve educational challenges and to support biomedical research. Playing games is deeply rooted in human culture, with new game modalities being repeatedly facilitated by new technology, such as video games enabled by electronics. Despite the recent advancements in biotechnology there is virtually no impact on gaming yet.
The Biotic Games project (Stanford University) enables players to interact directly with microorganisms. The game's "hardware" is a simple console which is hooked up to a lab slide. When players push buttons on the console the microorganisms on the slide react. These reactions are displayed onscreen in real-time via a microscopic camera.
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.
Foldit was founded by the University of Washington Center for Game Science in collaboration with the Baker lab.
In the last decade, scientists repeatedly failed to find a solution to the structure of a protein-cutting enzyme from an AIDS-like virus.
The scientists have decided to collect a group of gamers and challenged them to produce an accurate model of the enzyme: users are tasked with folding known proteins and are scored on how well they manage to accomplish this task while taking into consideration the physical properties of the molecule. In less then ten days, the gamers came up with the desired solution.
EteRNA is an online game which resembles Tetris or Dr. Mario was developed by Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford University researchers to uncover principles for designing molecules of RNA, which biologists believe may be the key regulator for all cellular activity.
Foldit is a revolutionary new computer game enabling you to contribute to important scientific research. This page describes the science behind Foldit and how your playing can help. What is a protein? Proteins are the workhorses in every cell of every living thing.
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