Benjamin Good

The Scripps Research Institute

@bgood

CROWDSOURCING BIOCURATION WITH BIOLOGICAL GAMES

BIOCURATORS FACED WITH MASSIVE AND GROWING AMOUNT OF WORK

• approaching 1 million articles added to PubMed every year

• By the end of my talk several new papers will be have been added....

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0

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1,000,000

new pubmed articles

year

HUMAN EFFORT AT MASSIVE SCALE

Seven million hours of human labor

Empire State Building

HUMAN EFFORT AT MORE MASSIVE SCALE

It is estimated that 9 billion hours of human labor were spent playing solitaire in 2005.

Von Ahn L. : Google Tech Talk: Human Computation 2006.

HUMAN EFFORT AT TRULY MASSIVE SCALE

Estimated that 150 billion hours spent playing games in 2010

McGonigal J. Reality is broken : why games make us better and how they can change the world. New York: Penguin Press; 2011.

empire state building

one year of solitaire

one year of games

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hours worked

Seven million hours of human labor = 1

Von Ahn L. : Google Tech Talk: Human Computation 2006.

Empire State Building

150 billion hours of human game play = nothing

150 billion hours of human game play = nothing

GAMES WITH A PURPOSE

Devise protein folding algorithms

Fix multiple sequence alignmentsDesign RNA molecules

Label all images on the Web

Annotate the human genome