Citizen Science
Do you think most students in India come out of bachelors, masters or even Ph.D. to be suitable engineers, scientists, cutting edge professionals or innovators? Unfortunately, the current education system often fails to provide enough training required for real world applications. Can there be a model which can help train students better as well help develop the community they come from? #Citizenscience has become a movement in US, Canada, and some European countries to do scientific research collectively, where citizens, often working long-distance away from the main lab learn to either collect or analyze data. This at times earns them even authorship and shared credit for research. The contribution can range from asking questions in neighborhood or collecting soil samples or analyzing secondary data sets. With the large number of engineering students, who can analyze data and learn to be part of the hottest profession of #datascience one would think that in India at least ten thousand professors and industries would be utilizing the power of data science. Sadly, until 2014 there was no major mention of any #citizenscience. This has changed since the return of Dr. Sukant Khurana from US to India. I was fortunate to join him and with him have been working on citizen science in India.
With long distance communication becoming easier day by day, citizen science can be implemented as a tree structure with a central node connecting state-wise nodes for data collection who can then connect with regional nodes who can then finally deploy people to collect data in their localities. This model can very efficiently be implemented among an institutional collaboration where students can become effective data collectors.
We have used citizen science to work on developing new artificial neural networks, predicting epilepsy, analyzing stock markets, visualizing spread of different diseases (with the goal to cover all neuronal disorders by the end of the year), developing new methods to use noise ignored in most data sets as unique finger-prints of data, and finding alternatives to correlation coefficient and information theoretic analysis. We are also involved in finding solutions to problems that concern all Indians, like arsenic in their water, by finding out the exact distribution and sources.
There are also projects which do not require any specialist training for participants. We have used citizen science to understand consumption of a superfood of Colocasia esculanta (Kochu) in different parts of Asia (here our citizen science extended across different countries) so that it can be concluded where can Kochu be best utilized as a fuel. Further, we have also used citizen science to understand mental health literacy in different parts and in different education strata of India. We have also used citizen science to understand what herbs are people using in their homes, which spices they are eating, which medicines they are taking and what food are they consuming. This data helps understand patterns and helps in policy making in different parts of India.
I hope you also join this citizen science movement or start your own such movements. If you want to join this movement, you can mail us at datanotjustdata@gmail.com
Ishan Goel
Our coordinates:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/DataIsNotJustData/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DataNotjustData
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/datanotjustdata/
