Billion Brain Blog

The notion that ordinary citizens with a strong interest in science – call them amateurs, enthusiasts, aficionados or even cheerleaders – can participate actively in cutting-edge science via the Web is no longer controversial. Galaxy Zoo (cataloguing galaxy images) and Foldit (folding proteins) are poster children for the citizen cyberscience movement. Perhaps even more intriguing are a number of smaller, less well-known projects like PrimeGrid (searching for new prime numbers) and Herbaria@home (digitizing archived historical plant clippings), where an amateur created a project, which is producing data professional scientists want to get their hands on.

But allowing flesh-and-blood citizens to enter the laboratory and actually do hands-on research is a much more radical proposal. For sure, there are nice examples of educational initiatives that get high-school kids involved in real lab-bench science. But letting just any old science enthusiast into the lab seems fraught with risks. Yet that is the long term goal of an experiment that my colleagues and I at Tsinghua University in Beijing are planning to carry out, in a space we have dubbed the Open Science Lab.

To be sure, we are starting from very modest beginnings. From a room next to my office, in a drab office block beside the main gates of Tsinghua, I can hear the tiny electronic squeals of a 3D printer, busy building a miniature skull. The printer stands in a room that we converted into makeshift lab space just a month ago, along a corridor we occupied a little over a year ago to start up Tsinghua’s first interdisciplinary research centre, the Centre for Nano and Micro Mechanics, CNMM. The lab is so new, there are still gaping holes in the wall where the air conditioners will be installed.

The 3D printer is not the world’s fastest. It can’t print exotic materials. It doesn’t have particularly high resolution. It has some rough edges – quite literally. But it has something else going for it. We bought it from a small company called Beijing Maxpace, set up by amateur enthusiasts here in Beijing, who belong to the local chapter of a global “maker community”, an informal network of people who just love to make stuff. In many ways, the maker community resembles the open source community of the software world, and in particular in their passion for what they do.

A Passion for Science

The neatest feature of our 3D printer, to my mind, is not the device itself, but the extremely enthusiastic after-sales service it comes with. We recently called Ming Zhang, the young man who sold it to us, to tell him that we were inviting a colleague, George Chen, from the Bioscience Department round to discuss a project. Ming immediately jumped in a cab to come over to Tsinghua.

What happened then was fun to watch. As he saw it printing, George got increasingly excited about the device, its ability to produce highly porous materials, and the amazing wealth of 3D designs being shared on the Web by enthusiasts, via a site called Thingiverse. George asked about using a new type of bioplastic that his research group makes, in the 3D printer. Ming was enthused by the new challenge of how to get the plastic powder, produced in the guts of bacteria, to work in his device. The outcome after an hour of intense discussion was a project for one of George’s students, who jotted down Ming’s phone number in his log book. A new pro-am partnership was born.

Nothing new here, you might say. After all, high-tech companies are often teaming up with academics on research projects – there are obvious win-win benefits in this sort of collaboration. But it was clear to me that the reason Ming had dropped everything to meet George went a good deal deeper than just the distant prospect of another sale. He was really keen to see his device used in a novel way. You could sense the relish of being confronted with a tough challenge.

Now extrapolate this enthusiasm to a room full of amateur makers and professional scientists, trying to build neat stuff together, and learn from each other. That’s where the Open Science Lab is headed. Such hackfests are common in the software world. With the Citizen Cyberscience Centre and the support of a fellowship from the South-African Shuttleworth Foundation, I was able to experiment with a version of hackfests where scientists meet software developers, here in Beijing, but also in Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town, New York, London and Berlin. Everywhere, new and unexpected things happened by mixing scientists, citizens and software geeks, and many promising projects have been born this way.

Open Science Lab will enable the same sort of inspired hacking to happen for 3D printers and a number of other scientific tools that have been open sourced, in particular a whole slew of sensors that can be built on top of the open-source Arduino micro-controller. What will the Open Science Lab look like in five years time? Well, let me tell you about my role model: ITP.

Artistic Inspiration

I stumbled on the Interactive Telecommunications Program, ITP, a masters programme tucked away in the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, by pure fluke. I invited myself for a visit using sheer chutzpah. And I’m due to teach a course there this autumn on citizen cyberscience as a result.

The place can best be described as MIT’s Media Lab turned upside down. Dan O’Sullivan, who chairs ITP, is the guy who put that pretty picture in my head. What he means by this inverted analogy is that curiosity-driven students decide what happens in this bustling space, not career-driven professors. Everything is about the high-tech student projects, yet many of the students have no background in technology. They want to make stuff that is cool – technology is just a means to an end for them. Although there is a formal educational framework here, this is as close as I know to a situation where ordinary citizens are driving technological innovation.

As befits such an unusual academic environment, ITP attracts unusual genius. Tom Igoe, one of the inventors of Arduino, shares an office, cluttered with bits and bobs of electronics, with Clay Shirky, whose books such as Cognitive Surplus have done so much to popularize the rapidly evolving world of citizen-driven solutions in science and business. When I visited ITP last month, Tom was teaching his students how to track monkeys. Lesson one: go to the zoo and study what monkeys do. Clay was trying to get his students to tackle the challenge of creating better conversational spaces on the Web, so people will collaborate rather than curse at each other.

But at the end of the day, the students take the course in their own hands, developing myriad projects based on what they have learned. And some of those projects go well beyond the walls of ITP. Project Noah, for example, is a tool for documenting wildlife on smartphones that has been spun off with support from National Geographic.

Whither Open Science?

If a bunch of art students can do this (ok, let’s be fair, there are some very tech-savvy students amongst them!) what happens if we mix science students into the broth? And what happens when science students team up with the maker community, open source enthusiasts and other skilled non-professionals, to solve problems that are befuddling the pros of science?

Over dinner last night in a local cafe, the director of Tsinghua’s CNMM, Quanshui Zheng, lent over the table excitedly as we discussed the prospects for Open Science Lab. What he said, effectively, was that for years, Tsinghua University had molded students into a single form, the standard academic 1.0. It was high time to have a little craziness added into this formula, to produce original thinkers, not publication drones.

That, coming from a leading academic at China’s top science and engineering University, is a pretty amazing statement. Whether Open Science Lab can live up to these expectations, time will tell.

How did ancient mariners judge the speed of their sailing ships? They would throw a log of wood overboard attached to a piece of rope, and measure how much rope was pulled along with the log in a fixed period of time measured with an hourglass. Sailors would then write the resulting estimate of the speed in a book … a log book.

So blog, a contraction of web and logbook, comes to us from this rather crude and ancient measurement technique. This serves as a reminder that log books, and by extension blogs, ought to record useful data. In fact, most of the blogs in cyberspace record thoughts, opinions, digressions, indiscretions and just about everything but useful data.

Of course, there are exceptions. In his recent and eminently readable book Reinventing Discovery, physicist and open science advocate Michael Nielsen makes a good case for ‘a new era of networked science’, as the book is subtitled. His first example is of a blogger and mathematician, Tim Gowers, and the progress he made on solving a tough mathematical problem thanks to blogging about it, and getting a lot of other mathematicians – pros and amateurs – involved that way. Gowers called this blog-based experiment the Polymath Project.

But this exception prove the rule. Even promising sites with names like ScienceBlog and ScienceBlogs are just reposting science news or giving a few loquacious scientists a chance to voice their thoughts, opinions, digressions etc. Nothing wrong with that, of course. But I don’t know of a site where scientists are actually blogging hard-core data, straight off the gizmos in their lab.

Why not? Why couldn’t someone create a science blog that was about recording scientific data on the Web? Not as an afterthought, put as a primary data archive? Michael Nielsen has a simple answer to this: publicly releasing data does nothing for a scientist’s career and could even damage it, by helping competitors.

So why did the blog-based Polymath Project work? Michael suggests that despite a radical appearance, the Polymath Project and other citizen cyberscience projects such as Galaxy Zoo are “ultimately projects in service of the conventional goal of writing scientific papers.” Michael goes on to argue that this is a problem, ” because some of the best ideas for improving the way scientists work involve a break away from the scientific paper as the ultimate goal of scientific research.”

Michael’s book contains many good ideas about how to make blogs and other online technologies more valuable and thus more widely used by science. But I’d like to focus on the most obvious one, namely using blogs to do what their log-monitoring forbears did – record data. This gives me the excuse to retell a story about an experiment I did together with colleagues at CERN nearly a decade ago, called openlogbook. (This is a blog, after all, so allow me to digress…)

The experiment was a collaboration with the ATHENA project, the predecessor of ALPHA. Both experiments have been pushing the envelope for our understanding of antimatter by making, trapping and – most recently this month – studying spectroscopically anti-hydrogen.

ATHENA was a small project by CERN standards, where small means “only” 20 or so university partners. There’s a hut above the experiment area where a few of the many scientists involved spend days and nights recording data. Despite several attempts, the ATHENA team had not managed to wean itself off paper-based logbooks. For some reason, people are just much better at noting things down on paper than in some electronic form.

The problem was that the resulting pile of paper logbooks – over a dozen got filled in a year – had to be copied twenty times and sent to each partner, so they had a record of what had happened. This was done once a year by a secretary, who spend a week making and distributing the copies. And by the time the scientists in far-flung labs got the photocopies, the information in them was hard to use: exactly what one scientists meant by “problems with the trigger”, jotted down at 3am seven months ago, was probably no longer clear even to the scientist who jotted it down.

The idea behind openlogbook was to use digital pen and paper for the logbooks, so that everything written down could be immediately shared via the web with the other scientists, while still affording them the convenience of an (almost) standard pen and paper logbook. We used a technology developed by a small Swedish firm, Anoto, whose chief developer had given a talk at CERN that impressed me. The pens were produced by Logitech at the time, and a variant is still produced by Livescribe. An example of a page from the Athena openlogbook is shown below.

One of the neat aspects of recording notes in a logbook this way was that the digital pen allowed accurate timestamping. So it was possible to go back quite precisely to find out when the scientist had written “problems with the trigger” and what was actually happening to the trigger in the data recorded from that instrument. We actually envisaged recording audio and even video continuously in the hut, so that it would be possible to go back and review exactly what had happened that night at 3am.

There were mixed feelings about this, since it meant the scientists would be under video surveillance. No more nose-picking or lewd jokes (you’d be surprised what scientists get up to at 3am). On the other hand, the notion of being able to track of being able to “replay” the experiment in this way was attractive But the project was a low-budget effort based on summer student manpower, a valuable but ephemeral resource at CERN, so we never got that far.

We did, however, get as far as using the digital logbooks during a real experimental run, in fact ATHENA’s last run before it shut down to transform into ALPHA. We even wrote up the results, which were very promising, for the CERN Courier. The main point was that for the first time, scientists in remote labs were able to review and interact with those in the ATHENA hut in nearly real time, commenting by email on things they read in the electronic logbook. We got a massive thumbs up from the ATHENA coordinator.

My colleagues and I made a valiant effort to get the technology adopted by the LHC experiment ATLAS. In fact, the team in charge of their digital logbook showed quite some interest. But a committee had ruled that there would be no paper logbooks in the ATLAS control room, so our particular approach would not fly. (We later heard that ATLAS scientists secretly smuggled paper into the control room, so strong was the urge to keep notes using this venerable medium).

Besides the issue of paper versus electronic recording, though, there is an aspect of openlogbook that still seems to me valuable for science, namely the idea of sharing data via a web-based logbook … a blog. Of course, ATHENA did not publish their data publicly – it was on a password-protected website. But the value of blogging data this way, even within a community, was clear. And the value of releasing this stream of data to the wider scientific community could be very powerful, indeed.

For example, in conventional scientific articles, there is always a methods section, which explains how the experiment was carried out. This is usually a staccato summary that makes it quite hard for anyone to reproduce it. Imagine if instead, you could simply review every moment of the experimental setup via a selection of key passages from such a blog. Overwhelming, perhaps. But if that became standard, it could make it very hard for scientists to perpetrate fraud in scientific papers. The point here is that blogging suddenly becomes useful to the scientist.

Openlogbook was a successful experiment, but it was probably a shade ahead of its time. The technology has moved on since then, and most importantly, the mindset of a younger generation of scientists is more open to such an approach. Maybe one day, we’ll get round to putting the log back in blog.

EPILOGUE: A final digression about Michael Nielsen and his inspiring book. I stumbled on Michael while he was preparing the book, via his blog. The reason was that I was looking for some good solid data on the web about the “long tails” that so famously characterize various types of internet behaviour. Turns out that, despite the success of the book “The Long Tail” by Wired editor Chris Anderson, there’s a paucity of real data to back this concept up (I mean graphs with numbers and fits to power laws and that sort of thing). I never found much data. But what I found on Michael’s blog, thanks to Google, was that he, too, had been looking for such data. One thing led to another, and I ended up chatting with him by skype, and later recommending him to the Open Society Foundations to interview about Open Science. They actually funded his book and subsequent book tour. So that is a case of a blog producing some very useful benefits for a scientist.