A collaborative citizen science platform for real-time volunteer computing and games

TL;DR

This paper presents an integrated platform combining volunteer computing and interactive citizen science games to enhance scientific research and education through real-time collaboration and resource sharing.

Contribution

It introduces an integrated platform that combines three tools to enable real-time volunteer computing and interactive citizen science activities.

Findings

Successful integration of VAS, LiveQ, and CitizenGrid tools.

Demonstration of combined volunteer computing and thinking.

Potential for new scientific and educational applications.

Abstract

Volunteer computing (VC) or distributed computing projects are common in the citizen cyberscience (CCS) community and present extensive opportunities for scientists to make use of computing power donated by volunteers to undertake large-scale scientific computing tasks. Volunteer computing is generally a non-interactive process for those contributing computing resources to a project whereas volunteer thinking (VT) or distributed thinking, which allows volunteers to participate interactively in citizen cyberscience projects to solve human computation tasks. In this paper we describe the integration of three tools, the Virtual Atom Smasher (VAS) game developed by CERN, LiveQ, a job distribution middleware, and CitizenGrid, an online platform for hosting and providing computation to CCS projects. This integration demonstrates the combining of volunteer computing and volunteer thinking to help address the scientific and educational goals of games like VAS. The paper introduces the three tools and provides details of the integration process along with further potential usage scenarios for the resulting platform.