Institute For The Future

Super-Collaboration

Some interesting innovation is afoot in the area of super-collaboration -- massively-scaled, cooperative research efforts that take advantage of supercomputing and abundant networking to tackle huge problems, faster.

 

Typically, super-collaboration has focused on harnessing the power of people and their distributed computers. SETI@home is the quintessential super-collaboration project.

 

SETI@home is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data.

 

Individuals in this kind of super-collaboration weren't active thinkers in this process. Participation was all about pooling computing resources -- not human resources.

 

But now, human intelligence is becoming increasingly important to super-collaboration. The best example of this shift is the new Stardust@Home project. They define their research problem:

 

On January 15, 2006, the Stardust spacecraft's sample return capsule parachuted gently onto the Utah desert. Nestled within the capsule were precious particles collected during Stardust's dramatic encounter with comet Wild 2 in January of 2004 and something else, even rarer and no less precious: tiny particles of interstellar dust that originate in distant stars, light-years away. They are the first such pristine particles ever collected in space, and scientists are eagerly waiting for their chance to "get their hands" on them.

 

Before they can be studied, though, these tiny interstellar grains will have to be found. This will not be easy. Unlike the thousand of particles of varying sizes collected from the comet, scientists estimate that Stardust collected only around 45 interstellar dust particles. They are tiny-only about a micron (a millionth of a meter) in size! These miniscule particles are embedded in an aerogel collector 1,000 square centimeters in size. To make things worse the collector plates are interspersed with flaws, cracks, and an uneven surface. All this makes the interstellar dust particles extremely difficult to locate.

 

If we were doing this project twenty years ago, we would have searched for the tracks through a high-magnification microscope. Because the view of the microscope is so small, we would have to move the microscope more than 1.6 million times to search the whole collector. In each field of view, you would focus up and down by hand to look for the tracks. This is so much work, that even starting twenty years ago, we would still be doing it today!

 

By combining human intelligence task software with the evidence they've already collected, they can massively condense the time period required for exhaustive analysis. They describe:

 

By asking for help from talented volunteers like you from all over the world, we can do this project in months instead of years. Of course, we can't invite hundreds of people to our lab to do this search-we only have two microscopes! To find the elusive particles we are using an automated scanning microscope to automatically collect images of the entire Stardust interstellar collector at the Curatorial Facility at Johnson Space Center in Houston. We call these stacks of images focus movies. All in all there will be nearly a million such focus movies. These are available to Stardust@home users like you around the world. You can then view them with the aid of a special Virtual Microscope (VM) that works in your web browser.

 

What's especially interesting about this project: the @home discoverer of any interstellar dust particle will appear as a co-author on any scientific paper by the Stardust@home collaboration announcing the discovery of the particle. The discoverer will also have the privilege of naming the particle! What an interesting way to combine amateur participation and harness the popular culture of fame with rigorous research methods.

 

I've speculated about the possible implications for combining human collective intelligence combined with supercomputing in the area of science here in a presentation on massively-popular scientific practice. But the potential for all kinds of research and development, including commercial R & D, is clearly enormous.