This special session aims to introduce the audience to the motivations, principles and opportunities offered by crowdsourcing technologies. We will emphasize the methodological contributions and describe upcoming technical challenges. This talk will present the speakers and organization of the session.

This talk will discuss the genesis of the Foldit project and early results that pioneered the field of scientific discovery games for molecular biology. It will provide an overview of the foundation of this field of research.

Biomedical literature is growing at a rate that outpaces our ability to harness the knowledge contained therein. In order to mine valuable inferences from the large volume of literature, many researchers have turned to information extraction algorithms to harvest information in biomedical texts. Advances in computational methods usually depends on the generation of gold standards by a limited number of expert curators. This process can be time consuming and represents an area of biomedical research that is ripe for exploration with citizen science. With our web-based application Mark2Cure (https://mark2cure.org), we demonstrate that citizen scientists can perform biocuration tasks on biomedical abstracts such as Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Relationship Extraction (RE). We discuss examples and challenges in applying citizen science to biomedical literature mining and explore additional biocuration and biomedical knowledge organization opportunities outside biomedical literature such as engaging citizen scientists to make biomedical research resources more findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable.

Launched in 2010, Phylo is a casual tile-matching game aiming to improve large-scale multiple sequence alignments. In this talk, we will discuss the origins and evolution of this scientific game during the last decade. We will discuss its motivations, its impact and various lessons we learned through this project.

Although algorithms for predicting RNA structure have been in development for decades, little is known about their accuracy in many of their use-cases. We created a database, "EternaBench", comprising the diverse high-throughput structural data gathered through the crowdsourced RNA design project Eterna, to evaluate the performance of a wide set of structure algorithms. Surprisingly, we found that lesser-used algorithms, which were developed through statistical learning, perform notably better than widely-used algorithms that are derived from experimental data. Motivated by this finding, we developed a multitask-learning-based model, "EternaFold", trained on the EternaBench data, which demonstrates improved predictions both on molecules from Eterna, as well as completely independent datasets of viral genomes and mRNAs. Experimental data from the project Eterna allows us to establish the first large-scale, independent benchmarks of RNA thermodynamic predictions, as well as leverage the diversity of player designs to improve structure prediction through statistical learning.

It might seem ironic that the goal of a citizen science project would be to render itself obsolete, but it turns out this could be the most fruitful approach for science and the most ethical approach for online participants. Stall Catchers is an online game created to accelerate Alzheimer's research at Cornell University. Today, over 25,000 registered Stall Catchers volunteers are analyzing datasets in 1 or 2 months that formerly required up to a year to analyze in the lab. Continuing to expand the participant community could further accelerate this analysis, however, a more efficient path might entail using the human generated data to improve machine-based contributions. This talk describes how the evolution of the Stall Catchers project may suggest a life cycle for future generations of citizen science projects that respects their contributors while maximizing societal impacts.

The human microbiome plays a fundamental role in human health. These microbes, that live on and inside of us, perform a range of critical functions, including vitamin synthesis and the production of short chain fatty acids. Research over the past decade has highlighted relationships between the microbiome and diseases like Inflammatory Bowel Disease, Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease, Parkinson’s, cancer and more. Concurrently, research has shown a remarkable degree of variability in the microbiome among individuals, with substantially more variation than peoples genomes. The factors related to the dynamic ranges of microbes observed are not well understood, nor is it known whether certain configurations are healthier or may predispose you to disease. Two major limitations are data: a small portion of the human population has been sampled, and the collective set of microbiome studies performed have incompatible standards. Within the American Gut Project, and its global extension The Microsetta Initiative, we are combating these limitations through infrastructure that allows virtually anyone to participate. To date, over 20,000 have submitted microbiome samples. The data produced, including a detailed voluntary questionnaire, are released de-identified into the public domain for anyone to reuse. In this talk, we discuss the importance of citizen science for the microbiome, and some of the challenges encountered since project inception in the fall of 2012.

Scientific games allow users to process raw experimental data and submit hypothesis to scientists that can be validated in labs. This theme will explore opportunities arising with the creation of new bridges between citizens and scientists, highlighting recent successes with the Foldit project. Citizen scientists have collaborated with scientists in an attempt to design anti-viral and anti-inflammatories against COVID-19.

While more rapidly deployable than other kinds of vaccines, COVID-19 mRNA vaccines have a problem: their poor chemical stability at refrigerator temperatures precludes worldwide delivery in prefilled syringes, as would be needed for immediate mass immunization. Recent studies have implicated mRNA structure as a critical factor in stability and expression, but our ability to rationally design these desired properties remains primitive. In March 2020, we launched the OpenVaccine challenge on Eterna (https://eternagame.org) to accelerate the design of stabilized, high-expression mRNA vaccines through a worldwide, open competition. The project involves an internet-scale videogame with mRNA design challenges; novel methods for rapid synthesis of 100s to 1000s of long mRNAs per round and for assessment of mRNA degradation and protein expression in human cells; and an IP framework ensuring open use of results while allowing companies to license exclusive redesign of their mRNA vaccine candidates.

We dedicated the last five years at Massively Multiplayer Online Science to bring citizen science activities to major videogames that resulted in the most active citizen science projects. We'll share the major milestones of this journey from Project Discovery Proteins to Borderlands Science and on.

How do we make a complex scientific task suitable to the universe of a sci-fi fast-paced role-playing first person shooter video game? In this talk, we will describe the challenges and choices that were made when designing the Borderlands Science puzzle game. We will also discuss how scientists and video game designers can efficiently work together to make a citizen science game scientifically relevant and fun!

TBD