RNA World Advanced User Participation Kit

[skgiven]

Any info on this?

Thanks,

[yoyo]

This will be presented tomorrow on the Citizen Cyberscience Summit here in London/UK. Afterwards we will share also the slides.
yoyo

[Michael H.W. Weber]

Well, let me briefly put forward the concept of the "Advanced User Participation Kit" (AUPK) which I briefly presented yesterday at the 2nd Cytizen Cyberscience Summit in London: At present, RNA World - as all other distributed computing projects - just allow users to download a small piece of software and run our applications to crunch away work units which our server assigns to them. Usually, there is a top-down structure where the DC project lead is in charge and the rest has to follow. As the leader of the RNA World project, I do not like that concept in general.

What we are planning to do is two things:

First, we will make our high performance DC infrastructure available to the public allowing people to conduct their own jobs using our applications. Besides specialized scientists, even regular users will be able to make use of this - provided they do dedicate their machines to contribute to our project (that is, be a participant of the RNA World project). We want to involve people, give back what they put in. To make this possible, again in our spare-time (reason for why things are sometimes slower than hoped for...), we have created user job submission interfaces which presumably will go live some time later this year. With this we want to break down barriers and disprove people claiming security issues with such types of concepts.

Second, with the AUPK, we would like to conduct an attempt to more deeply involve users into the process of generating real scientific knowledge and not just crank away some work units. We plan to provide a "kit" with which participants can hand-process data from the published RNA-relevant literature to prepare it for feeding it into the RNA World distributed supercomputer. For this, again, our user job submission interfaces will be utilized. The goal is to generally accelerate the process of identifying RNA families. And, of course, this whole process will seve as a pilot study as to how far it is possible to involve layman people into "hardcore" RNA research. I am very curious what the outcome will be.

Michael.

[skgiven]

Sounds interesting and educational.
Hope it works out as being much more than a proof of concept project.
I'll begin by being a bit more supportive - crunch more!
I look forward to reading more about it, and having a go.

Good Luck,