Innovation Hero — Emma Lundberg
For International Women’s Day 2021 I am writing about one female innovation hero per day for the week of 8th to 12th of March. Some of them you might have heard of, some of them not but they are all super inspiring in their own way and in their own domain.
Day 1: Professor Emma Lundberg (LinkedIn Profile)
My first awesome female innovator is a professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, visiting Associate Professor at Stanford University and sabbatical visitor at the Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub in San Francisco. She is also the founder of Mindforce Game Lab.
I’ve included her in my list of five awesome female innovator for her work with Project Discovery, a huge citizen science project where she and her group collaborated with one of the largest online computer games in the world, EVE Online, and worked with over 300 000 gamers to help map out the proteins in the Human Protein Atlas, an enormous undertaking which set out to map out all the human proteins back in 2003.
The Human Protein Atlas is one of Sweden’s biggest research projects EVER, with the task of mapping out and describing all the proteins in the human body, and also classifying them into subsets of where they can be found in the body.
To do this they needed to take on one of big challenges in life sciences, namely pattern recognition and classification of images. For seventeen years, yes you read that correctly, 17 years (!!) the project has been mapping and counting proteins, using a combination of AI and human labs to track and map ALL proteins in the human body.
The Human Protein Atlas is now an online, free to use, database search tool for anyone that wants to search information about the proteins in the human body.
And one big help in this was Project Discovery.
The idea was to use computer gamers to help map out where the different proteins could be found in the body, and also to see if citizen science combined with a computer game could match the AIs that normally did the image classification.
And yes, it worked! In the first four weeks of the project, the gamers had done 60 years of human work (!) and during the project the over 300 000 gamers that played Project Discovery managed to provide over 33 million classifications.
I think this is one of the coolest and best examples of citizen science I have ever encountered, so that’s why Professor Emma Lundberg is on my list.
Stay tuned the coming four days for four more awesome female innovators!
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
