Citizen Science Grid

The Citizen Science Grid is run by Travis Desell, an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of North Dakota. It is hosted by UND's Computational Research Center and Information Technology Systems and Services. The Citizen Science Grid is dedicated to supporting a wide range of research and educational projects using volunteer computing and citizen science, which you can read about and visit below.

Volunteer Your Computer Volunteer Your Brain

Climate Tweets

The Climate Tweets project is focused on personal opinions about climate change or global warming. The goal is to sort tweets and view the different views in various countries, how the discussion has changed over time, and how opinions change with political orientation. Classifying tweets allows us to discover patterns and coorelations in people's opinions about our world. It also helps us understand what people know about climate change. Please note that the tweets are unfiltered and may contain profanity or controversial views, and these are not the views of the Citizen Science Grid, any of our team, or funding agencies. Because of this the project is 18+.

SubsetSum@Home

The Subset Sum problem is described as follows: given a set of positive integers S and a target sum t, is there a subset of S whose sum is t? It is one of the well-know, so-called "hard" problems in computing. It's actually a very simple problem computationally, and the computer program to solve it is not extremely complicated. What's hard about it is the running time – all known exact algorithms have running time that is proportional to an exponential function of the number of elements in the set (for worst-case instances of the problem).

DNA@Home

The goal of DNA@Home is to discover what regulates the genes in DNA. Ever notice that skin cells are different from a muscle cells, which are different from a bone cells, even though all these cells have every gene in your genome? That's because not all genes are "on" all the time. Depending on the cell type and what the cell is trying to do at any given moment, only a subset of the genes are used, and the remainder are shut off. DNA@home uses statistical algorithms to unlock the key to this differential regulation, using your volunteered computers.

Wildlife@Home

Wildlife@Home is citizen science project aimed at analyzing video gathered from various cameras recording wildlife. Currently the project is looking at video of sharp-tailed grouse, Tympanuchus phasianellus, and two federally protected species, interior least terns, Sternula antillarum, and piping plovers, Charadruis melodus to examine their nesting habits and ecology.

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[all] new work

Hi Everyone!

Sorry about lots of delays in work generation but we've finally started up some new runs. Things have been pretty busy getting settled in here at RIT. We have some interesting work in the pipleline so we're hoping to have a new application out sometime this semester.

cheers,
--Travis

Travis Desell on Friday, March 1st
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[all] status update

Hi Everyone!

Sorry for a lot of silence on our end -- things have been quite hectic this summer! I accepted a new position and now am at Rochester Institute of Technology and busily getting a new lab set up (and having some students migrate along with me).

I'm going to let some of the work units clear out of the system and set up some new runs which should help fix some of the issues you've been seeing with bad workunits. In the longer term, I've started work on an updated binary which should also allow for the use of GPUs, which should hopefully allow the runs to scale a bit better without running into these problems.

I'll be keeping you posted as that comes along, but right now we're all just trying to get settled in a new place! Thanks again for all your support. The results coming in are definitely interesting ones!

Travis Desell on Thursday, October 4th
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[wildlife] new runs up and going

Hi All,

I've started up some new runs. These are using a different, larger, dataset, so let me know if you see any issues with them.

thanks!

Travis Desell on Thursday, May 17th
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[all] account manager issues update

Hi All,

It looks like the "team" table in the database had become corrupted and crashed. I repaired the database and it looks like all is working and I'm not seeing any errors on my end. Let me know if this fixed things for you.

cheers,
--Travis

Travis Desell on Saturday, May 26th
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[all] account manager issues

Hi Everyone,

I've been getting reports of account manager issues. Could anyone provide screenshots so I can get a better idea of what may be going on?

We haven't changed anything server side, was there a recent account manager upgrade that might have broken things? I'll do some server side BOINC code updates tonight to see if that fixes things.

Please let me know if you have any more information about issues you may be seeing so I can help track down the problem.

thanks!
--Travis

Travis Desell on Wednesday, May 2nd
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