The Oxford e-Research Centre Tuesday Seminar Series - "Extreme Citizen Science: extending participatory sensing and sense-making"

The Oxford e-Research Centre is pleased to welcome Dr Jerome Lewis from UCL, to present a seminar on Tuesday 21st February 2012.

This seminar is open to all and will start at 2pm in the Oxford e-Research Centre Access Grid Room (room 277 - access available via 7 Keble Road).

Abstract

The talk will outline the development of citizen science and volunteered geographic information over the past century, and present some of the new directions in which citizen science is moving. While these developments are important and have already made significant contributions to knowledge, they still remain marginal to most scientific practice. Public participation in such approaches is also very limited; most contributors to citizen science are affluent, urban males. However, in the domain of environmental justice, conservation and climate monitoring, citizen science activities are becoming increasingly popular and inclusive. A 5-year EPSRC funded project at UCL called Extreme Citizen Science (ExCiteS) will build on these experiences to push participatory sensing and analysis in more inclusive directions through both technical and methodological developments. Key to the ExCiteS approach is that participants, even non-literate people, are central actors in problem definition, defining data requirements, data collection, and in the analysis of the data they have collected.