Thèses : « Crowd science.Citizen science »

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Munke, Martin. « Citizen Science/Bürgerwissenschaften : Projekte, Probleme, Perspektiven (am Beispiel Sachsen) ». Sächsische Landesbibliothek - Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden, 2018. https://slub.qucosa.de/id/qucosa%3A21204.

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Unter dem englischen Begriff Citizen Science und seiner deutschen Entsprechung Bürgerwissenschaften werden eine Reihe von Konzepten gefasst, die eine Beteiligung von Laien bei der Generierung wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnisse bezeichnen. Diese Konzepte sind eng verbunden mit der Vorstellung einer Offenen Wissenschaft (Open Science) und ihrem Ziel, 'Wissenschaft einer größeren Zahl von Menschen einfacher zugänglich zu machen' (Wikipedia). Der Vortrag im Rahmen der Konferenz 'Forschungsdesign 4.0. Datengenerierung und Wissenstransfer in interdisziplinärer Perspektive' des Instituts für Sächsische Geschichte und Volkskunde e.V. vom 19. bis 21. April 2018 an der Sächsischen Landesbibliothek - Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden untersuchte unterschiedliche Definitionsansätze zusammengeführt und skizzierte am Beispiel aktueller Projekte aus Sachsen Probleme und Perspektiven von Citizen Science allgemein.

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Ruotsalainen, Marcus. « VALIDERINGSMETODER I CITIZEN SCIENCE : Sex stycken fallstudier av valideringsmetoder i citizen science projekt ». Thesis, Umeå universitet, Sociologiska institutionen, 2015. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-130683.

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This research looks at some of the different methods of validation used in the growing phenomenon citizen science. Citizen science is discussed and a small range of different typologies is used to define it. To find some of the common themes of validation six case studies are performed. The case studies examine the following six citizen science projects: GLOBE at Night, eBird, Citclops, Foldit, Galaxy Zoo and EyeWire. These projects a divided equally in to two types based on previous typological research: data collection projects and analysis projects. All projects are international in scope but differ greatly in actions and so in what type of validation they use. It is showed that some validation is made in comparison to data made by professionals or machine data or some other external source. In two cases the results of the project are self-validating and one case validation is made by experts on data that seems out of the ordinary. A few projects use consensus data i.e. the average of observations or analyses made by the citizen scientists either for validation or as a measure of probable correctness. A short discussion of the results and some suggestions of future research finishes of this research.

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Roth, Hannah Michelle. « Smartphone Privacy in Citizen Science ». Thesis, Virginia Tech, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/78360.

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Group signature schemes enable anonymous-yet-accountable communications. Such a capability is extremely useful for modern applications such as smartphone-based crowdsensing and citizen science. A prototype named GROUPSENSE was developed to support anonymous-yet-accountable crowdsensing with SRBE in Android devices. From this prototype, an Android crowdsensing application was implemented to support privacy in citizen science. In this thesis, we will evaluate the usability of our privacy-preserving crowdsensing application for citizen science projects. An in person user study with 22 participants has been performed showing that participants understood the importance of privacy in citizen science and were willing to install privacy-enhancing applications, yet over half of the participants did not understand the privacy guarantee. Based on these results, modifications to the crowdsensing application have been made with the goal of improving the participants' understanding of the privacy guarantee.
Master of Science

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Bernstein, Michael Scott. « Crowd-powered systems ». Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/74888.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2012.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 217-237).
Crowd-powered systems combine computation with human intelligence, drawn from large groups of people connecting and coordinating online. These hybrid systems enable applications and experiences that neither crowds nor computation could support alone. Unfortunately, crowd work is error-prone and slow, making it difficult to incorporate crowds as first-order building blocks in software systems. I introduce computational techniques that decompose complex tasks into simpler, verifiable steps to improve quality, and optimize work to return results in seconds. These techniques develop crowdsourcing as a platform so that it is reliable and responsive enough to be used in interactive systems. This thesis develops these ideas through a series of crowd-powered systems. The first, Soylent, is a word processor that uses paid micro-contributions to aid writing tasks such as text shortening and proofreading. Using Soylent is like having access to an entire editorial staff as you write. The second system, Adrenaline, is a camera that uses crowds to help amateur photographers capture the exact right moment for a photo. It finds the best smile and catches subjects in mid-air jumps, all in realtime. Moving beyond generic knowledge and paid crowds, I introduce techniques to motivate a social network that has specific expertise, and techniques to data mine crowd activity traces in support of a large number of uncommon user goals. These systems point to a future where social and crowd intelligence are central elements of interaction, software, and computation.
by Michael Scott Bernstein.
Ph.D.

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Mehran, Ramin. « Analysis of behaviors in crowd videos ». Doctoral diss., University of Central Florida, 2011. http://digital.library.ucf.edu/cdm/ref/collection/ETD/id/4801.

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In this dissertation, we address the problem of discovery and representation of group activity of humans and objects in a variety of scenarios, commonly encountered in vision applications. The overarching goal is to devise a discriminative representation of human motion in social settings, which captures a wide variety of human activities observable in video sequences. Such motion emerges from the collective behavior of individuals and their interactions and is a significant source of information typically employed for applications such as event detection, behavior recognition, and activity recognition. We present new representations of human group motion for static cameras, and propose algorithms for their application to variety of problems. We first propose a method to model and learn the scene activity of a crowd using Social Force Model for the first time in the computer vision community. We present a method to densely estimate the interaction forces between people in a crowd, observed by a static camera. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is used to learn the model of the normal activities over extended periods of time. Randomly selected spatio-temporal volumes of interaction forces are used to learn the model of normal behavior of the scene. The model encodes the latent topics of social interaction forces in the scene for normal behaviors. We classify a short video sequence of $n$ frames as normal or abnormal by using the learnt model. Once a sequence of frames is classified as an abnormal, the regions of anomalies in the abnormal frames are localized using the magnitude of interaction forces. The representation and estimation framework proposed above, however, has a few limitations. This algorithm proposes to use a global estimation of the interaction forces within the crowd. It, therefore, is incapable of identifying different groups of objects based on motion or behavior in the scene. Although the algorithm is capable of learning the normal behavior and detects the abnormality, but it is incapable of capturing the dynamics of different behaviors. To overcome these limitations, we then propose a method based on the Lagrangian framework for fluid dynamics, by introducing a streakline representation of flow. Streaklines are traced in a fluid flow by injecting color material, such as smoke or dye, which is transported with the flow and used for visualization. In the context of computer vision, streaklines may be used in a similar way to transport information about a scene, and they are obtained by repeatedly initializing a fixed grid of particles at each frame, then moving both current and past particles using optical flow. Streaklines are the locus of points that connect particles which originated from the same initial position. This approach is advantageous over the previous representations in two aspects: first, its rich representation captures the dynamics of the crowd and changes in space and time in the scene where the optical flow representation is not enough, and second, this model is capable of discovering groups of similar behavior within a crowd scene by performing motion segmentation. We propose a method to distinguish different group behaviors such as divergent/convergent motion and lanes using this framework. Finally, we introduce flow potentials as a discriminative feature to recognize crowd behaviors in a scene. Results of extensive experiments are presented for multiple real life crowd sequences involving pedestrian and vehicular traffic. The proposed method exploits optical flow as the low level feature and performs integration and clustering to obtain coherent group motion patterns. However, we observe that in crowd video sequences, as well as a variety of other vision applications, the co-occurrence and inter-relation of motion patterns are the main characteristics of group behaviors. In other words, the group behavior of objects is a mixture of individual actions or behaviors in specific geometrical layout and temporal order. We, therefore, propose a new representation for group behaviors of humans using the inter-relation of motion patterns in a scene. The representation is based on bag of visual phrases of spatio-temporal visual words. We present a method to match the high-order spatial layout of visual words that preserve the geometry of the visual words under similarity transformations. To perform the experiments we collected a dataset of group choreography performances from the YouTube website. The dataset currently contains four categories of group dances.
ID: 031001560; System requirements: World Wide Web browser and PDF reader.; Mode of access: World Wide Web.; Title from PDF title page (viewed August 26, 2013).; Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Central Florida, 2011.; Includes bibliographical references (p. 100-104).
Ph.D.
Doctorate
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Engineering and Computer Science
Electrical Engineering

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Casey, Leanne Maura. « Using citizen science to monitor bumblebee populations ». Thesis, University of Sussex, 2017. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/68403/.

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Bumblebees are important pollinators of crops and wildflowers and are currently in global decline. The main drivers of decline include agricultural intensification, climate change, invasive species, pesticides, parasites and pathogens and it is thought that these multiple stressors act together to impact populations. However, their relative importance is unknown and there are wide knowledge gaps in relation to the current status of species populations and their response to environmental variables such as climate, habitat and land use change. Citizen science offers a potential method of collecting data at a broad enough scale to measure species population responses to environmental stressors and it has successfully been applied to other taxa, particularly UK birds and butterflies. This thesis investigates the use of citizen science to address the current knowledge gaps in the status of UK bumblebee populations by analysing volunteer-collected data on current distribution and abundance trends in relation to habitat and climate change. Results are compared to previous studies to infer long-term changes in population dynamics. The value of applying citizen science methods to bumblebee monitoring is highlighted, revealing evidence for decline of some common species and the recent retraction of rare species to their climatic optima. The main findings reveal a potential impact of climate on the distribution of winter-active bumblebees. They also indicate that, while urban parks and gardens provide refuge for bumblebees in an otherwise impoverished landscape, urbanisation may favour short-tongued generalist species over long-term specialists. The outcomes of this thesis have important management implications for UK bumblebee populations including the need for reassessment of the conservation status of B. soroeensis and the sympathetic management of urban parks and gardens for longtongued specialists through the provision of suitable forage material.

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Zilli, Davide. « Smartphone-powered citizen science for bioacoustic monitoring ». Thesis, University of Southampton, 2015. https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/382943/.

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Citizen science is the involvement of amateur scientists in research for the purpose of data collection and analysis. This practice, well known to different research domains, has recently received renewed attention through the introduction of new and easy means of communication, namely the internet and the advent of powerful “smart” mobile phones, which facilitate the interaction between scientists and citizens. This is appealing to the field of biodiversity monitoring, where traditional manual surveying methods are slow and time consuming and rely on the expertise of the surveyor. This thesis investigates a participatory bioacoustic approach that engages citizens and their smartphones to map the presence of animal species. In particular, the focus is placed on the detection of the New Forest cicada, a critically endangered insect that emits a high pitched call, difficult to hear for humans but easily detected by their mobile phones. To this end, a novel real time acoustic cicada detector algorithm is proposed, which efficiently extracts three frequency bands through a Goertzel filter, and uses them as features for a hidden Markov model-based classifier. This algorithm has permitted the development of a cross-platform mobile app that enables citizen scientists to submit reports of the presence of the cicada. The effectiveness of this approach was confirmed for both the detection algorithm, which achieves an F1 score of 0.82 for the recognition of three acoustically similar insects in the New Forest; and for the mobile system, which was used to submit over 11,000 reports in the first two seasons of deployment, making it one of the largest citizen science projects of its kind. However the algorithm, though very efficient and easily tuned to different microphones, does not scale effectively to many-species classification. Therefore, an alternative method is also proposed for broader insect recognition, which exploits the strong frequency features and the repeating phrases that often occur in insects songs. To express these, it extracts a set of modulation coefficients from the power spectrum of the call, and represents them compactly by sampling them in the log-frequency space, avoiding any bias towards the scale of the phrase. The algorithm reaches an F1 score of 0.72 for 28 species of UK Orthoptera over a small training set, and an F1 score of 0.92 for the three insects recorded in the New Forest, though with higher computational cost compared to the algorithm tailored to cicada detection. The mobile app, downloaded by over 3,000 users, together with the two algorithms, demonstrate the feasibility of real-time insect recognition on mobile devices and the potential of engaging a large crowd for the monitoring of the natural environment.

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CESARANO, CINZIA. « Citizen Science approaches for beach litter monitoring ». Doctoral thesis, Università Politecnica delle Marche, 2022. https://hdl.handle.net/11566/305901.

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Questa tesi dal titolo "Approcci della scienza dei cittadini per il monitoraggio dei rifiuti da spiaggia" si concentra sui rifiuti marini delle spiagge (di seguito MBL). MBL rappresenta un enorme problema che riguarda le aree scientifiche, economiche e sociali. Durante il primo anno di dottorato è stata organizzata e realizzata un'attività pilota di citizen science per il monitoraggio dell'ambiente balneare con studenti delle scuole primarie e secondarie, utilizzando il protocollo MAC-Emerso. Le osservazioni raccolte sono state incluse nel database ufficiale MAC-Emerso. Durante il secondo anno, è stata completata un'analisi bibliometrica sul MBL e i risultati raggiunti sono stati organizzati per la pubblicazione in una rivista peer-reviewed. Inoltre, è stata effettuata un'analisi preliminare del database nazionale MAC-Emerso disponibile. Il terzo anno è stato dedicato alla compilazione di studi e programmi precedenti incentrati sul monitoraggio MBL e sulle campagne di bonifica lungo la costa mediterranea. Tutte le metodologie applicate fino ad oggi sono state analizzate e confrontate nel dettaglio per identificare i punti di forza e di debolezza dei protocolli attuali, il coinvolgimento dei cittadini e le lacune esistenti. La presente tesi è composta da otto capitoli e due articoli e si apre con un'introduzione generale che descrive MBL (Capitolo 1). Il capitolo 2 discute l'obiettivo generale della ricerca di dottorato e riassume gli articoli inclusi nella tesi di dottorato. Il capitolo 3 esamina in dettaglio la strategia marina, mentre il capitolo 4 si concentra sulla scienza dei cittadini e sul protocollo MAC-Emerso. Il capitolo 5 descrive i principali risultati raggiunti, inclusa l'attività pilota di citizen science organizzata e realizzata per il monitoraggio dell'ambiente balneare con gli studenti delle scuole primarie e secondarie che utilizzano il protocollo MAC-Emerso. Il capitolo 6 comprende la raccolta dei due articoli scientifici su MBL realizzati durante le attività di dottorato. Il primo paper (Cesarano et al., 2021) è stato pubblicato su Marine Pollution Bulletin (con ranking Q1), mentre il secondo paper è stato recentemente inviato alla stessa rivista. Il primo esplora la letteratura scientifica globale sull'MBL attraverso un'accurata analisi bibliometrica. Quest'ultimo presenta una revisione sistematica della letteratura corrente sul monitoraggio MBL lungo le coste del Mediterraneo. Insieme, forniscono una revisione completa delle conoscenze scientifiche sull'MBL nella regione mediterranea e offrono spunti interessanti per capire dove si trovano le lacune attuali e cosa sarebbe necessario per sviluppare un monitoraggio più efficiente su scala di bacino a sostegno dei nostri sforzi per affrontare il Sfida MBL. Infine, un'osservazione conclusiva dei risultati complessivi raggiunti nel presente studio è elaborata nel Capitolo 7. Segue una nota sugli altri prodotti non inclusi in questa tesi, ma eseguiti durante il mio periodo di dottorato. Quindi, un elenco di riferimento degli studi menzionati attraverso la tesi conclude questo documento.
This thesis entitled “Citizen Science approaches for beach litter monitoring” focuses on Marine Beach Litter (hereafter MBL). MBL represents a huge problem that concerns scientific, economic, and social areas. During the first year of my PhD, a pilot citizen science activity was organized and realized for monitoring beach environment with primary and secondary school students, using the MAC-Emerso protocol. The collected observations were included in the official MAC-Emerso database. During the second year, a bibliometric analysis on the MBL topic has been completed and the achieved results have been organized for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. Furthermore, a preliminary analysis of the available national MAC-Emerso database was carried out. The third year was devoted to compile previous studies and programs focusing on MBL monitoring and cleanup campaigns along the Mediterranean coastline. All the methodologies applied to date have been analysed and compared in detail to identify strengths and weaknesses of current protocols, citizen involvement, and existing gaps. The present thesis consists of eight chapters and two papers and opens with a general introduction describing MBL (Chapter 1). Chapter 2 discusses the overall aim of the PhD research, and summarizes the papers included in the PhD thesis. Chapter 3 examines in detail the Marine Strategy, while Chapter 4 focuses on Citizen Science and the MAC-Emerso protocol. Chapter 5 describes the main results achieved, including the pilot citizen science activity organized and realized for monitoring beach environment with primary and secondary school students using the MAC-Emerso protocol. Chapter 6 includes the collection of the two scientific papers on MBL realized during the PhD activities. The first paper (Cesarano et al., 2021) has been published in Marine Pollution Bulletin (with Q1 ranking), while the second paper has been recently submitted to the same journal. The former explores the global scientific literature on MBL through an accurate bibliometric analysis. The latter presents a systematic review of current literature concerning MBL monitoring along the Mediterranean coasts. Together, they do provide a comprehensive review of the scientific knowledge on MBL in the Mediterranean region and offer interesting insights to understand where current gaps lie, and what would be needed to develop a basin-scale more efficient monitoring in support of our efforts to tackle the MBL challenge. Finally, a concluding remark of the overall results achieved in the present study is elaborated in Chapter 7. A note about the other products not included in this thesis, but performed during my PhD period, follows. Then, a reference list of the studies mentioned through the thesis ends this document.

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Wang, Sunrise. « Evolving controllable emergent crowd behaviours with Neuro-Evolution ». Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/20015.

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Crowd simulations have become increasingly popular in films over the past decade, appearing in large crowd shots of many big name block-buster films. An important requirement for crowd simulations in films is that they should be directable both at a high and low level, and be believable. As agent-based techniques allow for low-level directability and more believable crowds, they are typically used in this field. However, due to the bottom-up nature of these techniques, achieving high level direct ability requires the modification of agent-level parameters until the desired crowd behaviour emerges. As manually adjusting parameters is a time consuming and tedious process, this thesis investigates a method for automating this, using Neuro-Evolution (NE). This is achieved by using Artificial Neural Networks as the agent controllers within an animated scene, and evolving these with an Evolutionary Algorithm so that the agents behave as desired. To this end, this thesis proposes, implements, and evaluates a system that allows for the low-level control of crowds using NE. Overall, this approach shows very promising results, with the time taken to achieve the desired crowd behaviours being either on par or faster than previous methods.

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Benavides, Aerin Benavides. « Meanings teachers make of teaching science outdoors as they explore citizen science ». Thesis, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2016. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10123698.

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This descriptive case study examined the meanings public elementary school teachers (N = 13) made of learning to enact citizen science projects in their schoolyards in partnership with a local Arboretum. Utilizing Engeström’s (2001) framework of cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), the Arboretum’s outreach program for area Title 1 schools was viewed as an activity system composed of and acting in partnership with the teachers. The major finding was that teachers designed and mastered new ways of teaching (expansive learning) and transformed their citizen science activity to facilitate student engagement and learning. I highlight four important themes in teachers’ expansive learning: (a) discussion, (b) inclusion, (c) integration, and (d) collaboration. Teacher learning communities formed when colleagues shared responsibilities, formed mentor/mentee relationships, and included student teachers and interns in the activity. This program could serve as a model for elementary school citizen science education, as well as a model for professional development for teachers to learn to teach science and Environmental Education outdoors.

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Zhan, Beibei. « Learning crowd dynamics using computer vision ». Thesis, Kingston University, 2008. http://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/20302/.

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An increase of violence in public spaces has prompted the introduction of more sophisticated technology to improve the safety and security of very crowded environments. Research disciplines such as civil engineering and sociology, have studied the crowd phenomenon for years, employing human visual observation to estimate the characteristics of a crowd. Computer vision researchers have increasingly been involved in the study and development of research methods for the automatic analysis of the crowd phenomenon. Until recently, most existing methods in computer vision have been focussed on extracting a limited number of features in controlled environments, with limited clutter and numbers of people. The main goal of this thesis is to advance the state of the art in computer vision methods for use in very crowded and cluttered environments. One of the aims is to devise a method that in the near future would be of help in other disciplines such as socio-dynamics and computer animation, where models of crowded scenes are built manually on painstaking visual observation. A series of novel methods is presented here that can learn crowd dynamics automatically by extracting different crowd information from real world crowded scenes and modelling crowd dynamics using computer vision. The developed methods include an individual behaviour classifier, a scene cluttering level estimator, two people counting schemes based on colour modelling and tracking, two algorithm for measuring crowd motion by matching local descriptors, and two dynamics modelling methods - one based on statistical techniques and the other one based on a neural network. The proposed information extracting methods are able to gather both macro information, which represents the properties of the whole crowd, and micro information, which is different from individual (location) to individual (location). The statistically-based dynamics modelling models the scene implicitly. Furthermore, a method for discovering the main path of the crowded scene is developed based on it. Self-Organizing Map (SOM) is chosen in the neural network approach of modelling dynamics; the resulting SOMs are proven to be able to capture the main dynamics of the crowded scene.

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Holden, Anna Dean. « Organizing Rural Communities for Effective Citizen Science Programs ». The University of Montana, 2007. http://etd.lib.umt.edu/theses/available/etd-04252007-134546/.

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Citizen science, or the use of volunteers for scientific projects, is becoming a popular way for agencies and organizations to collect data. The benefits of citizen science include saving the agency or organization resources, educating the community about conservation issues, and promoting land stewardship. Currently, many citizen monitoring organizations are based in urban areas, whereas their projects are located near more rural towns. Research shows that demographics such as area of residence can be a factor in the publics attitude toward any scientific or land management project (Williams et al, 2002; Kellert, 1978, 1985; Vaske et al, 2001). This fact was supported by a citizen science project, led by the author, on the Clearwater National Forest. Currently, no citizen science organizing manuals address the issue of rural/urban difference in volunteer recruitment. Additionally, the question of what qualities citizen science must have to be used by government agencies must be determined so that non-governmental organizations can produce useful data. I interviewed 11 successful urban-based citizen science conservation organizations in order to establish the characteristics of successful volunteer recruitment and retention. Additionally, I interviewed five state or federal agencies that used citizen science data in order to establish the characteristics of effective citizen science programs. Using Glesne (1999) as a guide, interviews were numbered and coded. Results showed that successful recruitment methods differ between rural and urban areas, with word of mouth and local newspapers as most effective. Citizens must believe in the program, have a social atmosphere associated with the program, and have a personal relationship with the project organizer in order to volunteer again. There is a difference in rural and urban communities, having to do with different values, priorities, and environmental awareness. Effective citizen science programs share three main characteristics: a proper training program, scientific accuracy, and a quality control program.

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Morais, Alessandra Marli Maria. « Extracting behavioral profiles from citizen science usage logs ». Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE), 2016. http://urlib.net/sid.inpe.br/mtc-m21b/2016/07.06.18.43.

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Citizen science projects are those which recruit volunteers to participate as assistants in scientific studies. These projects are a longstanding tradition of volunteers recruitment which predates the Internet. The advent of the Web enabled the citizen science projects to expand into new domains and gain popularity. Web-based citizen science is established on technological and motivational pillars. Understanding the motivational aspect for volunteers is crucial to plan, design and manage citizen science projects. Some researchers have studied volunteers motivation to work as assistants by conducting interviews with selected subgroups. These studies can elicit detailed information from volunteers, but they are restricted to a subset of participants. Another way to infer some information about the volunteers motivations consist of analyzing records (of which volunteer did what and when) registered by web-based Citizen Science projects. This work aims to investigate information that can be extracted from these records (usage logs), especially those which may help understanding volunteers motivation. To achieve it, this work adapts a model for human interaction with technology in a citizen science context. The adapted model allows the definition of a set of features which will be used in an attempt to characterize volunteers profiles. To conduct this research machine learning algorithms and exploratory data analysis will be used following a data science approach.
Projetos de ciência cidadã são aqueles que recrutam voluntários para participar como assistentes em estudos científicos. Esses projetos são uma tradição de longa data que antecede a Internet. O advento da Web permitiu que os projetos de ciência cidadã expandissem em novos domínios e ganhassem popularidade. A ciência cidadã baseada na Web é estabelecida nos pilares tecnológico e motivacional. Compreender o aspecto motivacional dos voluntários é fundamental para planejar, projetar e gerenciar tais projetos. A motivação dos voluntários para trabalhar como assistentes tem sido estudada através da realização de entrevistas com voluntários. Estes estudos podem extrair informações detalhadas dos voluntários, mas são restritos a um subconjunto de participantes. Uma outra maneira para inferir informações sobre a motivação dos voluntários consiste em analizar registros (do que o voluntário fez e quando) coletados por tais projetos. Este trabalho tem como objetivo investigar as informações que podem ser extraídas a partir desses registros (logs de uso), especialmente aquelas que possam ajudar a compreender a motivação dos voluntários. Para alcançá-lo, este trabalho adapta um modelo da interação humana com tecnologia no contexto da ciência cidadã. O modelo adaptado permite a definição de um conjunto de características que irá ser utilizado na tentativa de caracterizar perfis de voluntários. Para conduzir esta pesquisa algoritmos de aprendizado de máquina e análise exploratória de dados serão utilizados seguindo um processo Data Science.

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Toriseva, Jenni. « Biofonia : A citizen science service to monitor biodiversity ». Thesis, Umeå universitet, Designhögskolan vid Umeå universitet, 2016. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-155160.

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An increasing amount of both physical and mental layers keep distancing urban dwellers from the biophysical envi- ronment that we often call nature. Environmental psycholo- gists have coined the term ‘extinction of experience’ to de- scribe the decreasing amount of encounters urban dwellers have with the natural environment. With the depletion of these experiences we have less relation to the natural world. And what we cannot relate to, we find hard to value. The intent has been to explore new ways urban dwelling adults could interact with the natural environment in order to help them relate to the abstract notion of biodiversity. The final concept is inspired by expert and user insights gathered through ethnographic research methods. The resulting design concept is a service and product eco- system that is based in the field of soundscape ecology.

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McGraw, Ian C. (Ian Carmichael). « Crowd-supervised training of spoken language systems ». Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/75641.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2012.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 155-166).
Spoken language systems are often deployed with static speech recognizers. Only rarely are parameters in the underlying language, lexical, or acoustic models updated on-the-fly. In the few instances where parameters are learned in an online fashion, developers traditionally resort to unsupervised training techniques, which are known to be inferior to their supervised counterparts. These realities make the development of spoken language interfaces a difficult and somewhat ad-hoc engineering task, since models for each new domain must be built from scratch or adapted from a previous domain. This thesis explores an alternative approach that makes use of human computation to provide crowd-supervised training for spoken language systems. We explore human-in-the-loop algorithms that leverage the collective intelligence of crowds of non-expert individuals to provide valuable training data at a very low cost for actively deployed spoken language systems. We also show that in some domains the crowd can be incentivized to provide training data for free, as a byproduct of interacting with the system itself. Through the automation of crowdsourcing tasks, we construct and demonstrate organic spoken language systems that grow and improve without the aid of an expert. Techniques that rely on collecting data remotely from non-expert users, however, are subject to the problem of noise. This noise can sometimes be heard in audio collected from poor microphones or muddled acoustic environments. Alternatively, noise can take the form of corrupt data from a worker trying to game the system - for example, a paid worker tasked with transcribing audio may leave transcripts blank in hopes of receiving a speedy payment. We develop strategies to mitigate the effects of noise in crowd-collected data and analyze their efficacy. This research spans a number of different application domains of widely-deployed spoken language interfaces, but maintains the common thread of improving the speech recognizer's underlying models with crowd-supervised training algorithms. We experiment with three central components of a speech recognizer: the language model, the lexicon, and the acoustic model. For each component, we demonstrate the utility of a crowd-supervised training framework. For the language model and lexicon, we explicitly show that this framework can be used hands-free, in two organic spoken language systems.
by Ian C. McGraw.
Ph.D.

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Prudic, Kathleen, Kent McFarland, Jeffrey Oliver, Rebecca Hutchinson, Elizabeth Long, Jeremy Kerr et Maxim Larrivée. « eButterfly : Leveraging Massive Online Citizen Science for Butterfly Conservation ». MDPI AG, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/626609.

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Data collection, storage, analysis, visualization, and dissemination are changing rapidly due to advances in new technologies driven by computer science and universal access to the internet. These technologies and web connections place human observers front and center in citizen science-driven research and are critical in generating new discoveries and innovation in such fields as astronomy, biodiversity, and meteorology. Research projects utilizing a citizen science approach address scientific problems at regional, continental, and even global scales otherwise impossible for a single lab or even a small collection of academic researchers. Here we describe eButterfly an integrative checklist-based butterfly monitoring and database web-platform that leverages the skills and knowledge of recreational butterfly enthusiasts to create a globally accessible unified database of butterfly observations across North America. Citizen scientists, conservationists, policy makers, and scientists are using eButterfly data to better understand the biological patterns of butterfly species diversity and how environmental conditions shape these patterns in space and time. eButterfly in collaboration with thousands of butterfly enthusiasts has created a near real-time butterfly data resource producing tens of thousands of observations per year open to all to share and explore.

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Magdziarz, Susan F. « Examining participation in a Dolphin Observation Citizen Science program ». Thesis, California State University, Long Beach, 2013. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=1523113.

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This research project examined how people utilized the Dolphin Observation Citizen Science Kit at the Crystal Cove Beach Cottages. This study explored whether this citizen science program successfully engaged people in a recreational setting that is not normally associated with science learning opportunities.

Most research on citizen science programs has focused on projects that attract people who already have an interest in science. This study took place in a location that attracts people who may have weak science identities, which made it possible to learn more about how this audience engages in citizen science programs.

The data showed that people in this setting participated in this citizen science program. People with weak and strong science identities used the kit. This indicates that this type of recreational setting could be further explored as a place to engage people with weak science identities in science education activities.

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Soares, Marinalva Dias. « Employing citizen science to label polygons of segmented images ». Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais, 2011. http://urlib.net/sid.inpe.br/mtc-m19/2011/08.02.16.43.

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A interpretação de cenas em imagem pode ser considerada a associação de significado semântico aos objetos contidos na imagem. Normalmente, antes da interpretação, é preciso segmentar a imagem. A segmentação particiona uma imagem em regiões (usualmente polígonos), de modo que os elementos pertencentes a cada região sejam similares com relação a uma ou mais propriedades tais como nível de cinza, textura ou cor. No entanto, a segmentação pode criar um grande número de polígonos e esses polígonos devem ser rotulados, usualmente com alta informação semântica. A rotulação de polígonos pode ser manual ou automática. A rotulação manual precisa de um especialista humano para usar seu conhecimento e experiência. No entanto, esta tarefa é, embora não complexa, demorada, repetitiva e propensa a erros. É impraticável para um único especialista analisar e rotular polígono por polígono. A rotulação automática deve incorporar conhecimento humano para obter sucesso. Entretanto, a rotulação automática também pode levar a erros uma vez que os algoritmos não podem reproduzir fielmente o conhecimento e experiência que os humanos usam. Esta tese apresenta uma alternativa para rotulação manual de polígonos, baseada em citizen science, usando vários agentes humanos que podem ou não ter o mesmo conhecimento que o especialista para realizar a tarefa de rotulação. Citizen science envolve voluntários do público em geral que agem como participantes ou observadores para coleta, classificação ou análise de dados. Os dados dos voluntários podem ou não ser precisos; erros são esperados. Mas, coletivamente, a participação de voluntários pode gerar conhecimento e bons resultados para a pesquisa científica. O experimento conduzido com os voluntários neste trabalho foi baseado na rotulação de mais de 2400 polígonos resultantes da segmentação de uma imagem de cena urbana. Várias métricas foram derivadas das análises realizadas nos dados coletados durante o processo de rotulação. Isso possibilitou avaliar a qualidade e confiabilidade das rotulações dos voluntários. Essas métricas demonstraram que citizen science é uma abordagem viável e é uma alternativa potencial para ser considerada para rotulação de polígonos. O trabalho também mostra que esta alternativa agrega valores e complementa o conhecimento fornecido pelo especialista do domínio. Exemplos de como essas métricas podem ser empregadas pelo especialista também são apresentados.
Interpretation of scenes in image can be considered as associating semantic meaning to objects in the image. Usually, before the interpretation, it is necessary to segment the image. Segmentation partitions an image into regions (usually polygons), so the elements belonging to each region are similar with respect to one or more properties such as gray level, texture or color. However, segmentation may create several polygons and these polygons must be labeled, usually with semantically high information about it. Polygon labeling can be manual or automatic. Manual labeling needs a human expert to use his/her knowledge and experience. However, this task is, though not complex, time-consuming, repetitive and error prone. It is impractical for a single expert to analyze polygon by polygon and label them. Automatic labeling must incorporate human knowledge to be successful. However, automatic labeling may also to lead to errors since algorithms cannot reproduce faithfully the knowledge and experience that humans use. This thesis presents an alternative for manual labeling of polygons, based on citizen science, using several different human agents that may not have the same expertise as the expert to perform the labeling task. Citizen Science involves volunteers from the general public that act as participants or observers for data collection, classification or analysis. The volunteers' data may or may not be accurate; errors are expected. But, collectively, the volunteers' participation can generate knowledge and good results for scientific research. The experiment conducted with the volunteers in this work was based on labeling of more than 2400 polygons resulting from the segmentation of an image of urban scene. Several metrics have been derived from analyzing the data collected during the labeling process. This enabled the evaluation of the quality and reliability of their participation. These metrics demonstrated that citizen science is a feasible approach and it is a potential alternative to be considered for labeling polygons. The work also shows that this alternative aggregates values and complements the knowledge provided by a domain's expert. Examples of how these metrics may be employed by the expert are also presented.

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Silva, Rui Manuel Roque da. « Using data from citizen-science to monitor bird invasions ». Master's thesis, Universidade de Évora, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10174/23690.

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As consequências ecológicas da introdução de espécies exóticas, é uma das questões de conservação mais preocupantes mundialmente. A utilização de dados de ciência cidadã, tem sido proposta como uma solução alternativa para analisar este problema. Assim, o nosso principal objectivo foi avaliar a adequabilidade de dados de ciência cidadã para monitorizar as tendências populacionais e de distribuição de espécies exóticas (Psittaciformes and Sturnidae) na região urbana de Lisboa, utilizando três principais grupos de fontes de dados. Estes dados foram validados, uma vez que foram recolhidos por colaboradores experientes, a quantidade de registos foi considerável, e os padrões espácio-temporais relativamente homogéneos. Entre as oito espécies mais registadas, o periquito-rabijunco e o mainá-de-crista, tiveram o maior aumento populacional e de distribuição. Para o periquitão-de-cabeça-azul, foi igualmente registado um aumento, mas menos marcado, enquanto as restantes espécies registadas ocasionalmente. Desta forma, a ciência cidadã demonstrou ser uma ferramenta útil alternativa à ciência convencional; Abstract: The ecological consequences from the introduction of non-native species are among the major conservation concerns worldwide. Using citizen-science data has been proposed as an alternative solution to asses this problem. Thus, our main goal was to evaluate the suitability of citizen-science data to monitor the population and distribution trend of non-native species (Psittaciformes and Sturnidae) in the urban region of Lisbon. The evaluation included three major groups of data sources. We validated the suitability of citizen-science data since the contributors' expertise is in general high, the amount of records is considerable, and the spatio-temporal patterns are relatively homogeneous. Among the eight most recorded species, the Ring-necked Parakeet and the Crested Myna showed a noticeable increase in population and distribution range. The Blue-crowned Parakeet also increased but less markedly, while for the remaining species there were only occasional records. Therefore, the citizen-science showed to be a valuable alternative to conventional science.

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Munke, Martin. « Citizen Science/Bürgerwissenschaft : Projekte, Probleme, Perspektiven am Beispiel Sachsen ». Institut für Sächsische Geschichte und Volkskunde, 2019. https://slub.qucosa.de/id/qucosa%3A35925.

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Reynolds, Emily Ann, et Emily Ann Reynolds. « Examining the Effectiveness of Citizen Science in Wildlife Conservation ». Thesis, The University of Arizona, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/622833.

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The purpose of this research was to develop, implement, and evaluate a citizen science program to survey and monitor for jaguars (Panthera onca) and ocelots (Leopardus pardalis) within key mountain ranges in southwest Arizona. I had three main objectives: 1.) develop and implement a citizen science program to train participants with little or no knowledge of wildlife conservation, 2.) identify program effectiveness in comparison with experts in terms of the quality of data gathered and the financial and administrative costs/benefits, 3.) understand what creates an effective citizen science program and how it can be replicated in the future. This research examined the efficacy of using citizen science as a tool to connect the public and scientific community through education and a research-based project. A network of citizen scientists were provided extensive education and training by field experts to participate in jaguar and ocelot monitoring in southern Arizona. The scale and scope of this project is unprecedented in the citizen science literature; participants drove and hiked off-trail monitoring wildlife cameras monthly for a minimum of one year in extremely rugged backcountry conditions in the mountains near the U.S./Mexico border. Citizen science participants were challenged by terrain, weather, and border issues during their time on this project. Despite these challenges, our group of nine citizen scientists successfully downloaded and sorted 28,637 photos from 22 cameras at 14 monitoring sites over 12 months. They logged a total of 327 hours of fieldwork including driving, hiking, and performing camera maintenance. After finishing a site visit, citizen scientists also sorted photos identifying wildlife, logging approximately 109 hours of data organization. In addition, 100% of our citizen scientists adhered to our protocols that we tested and implemented in the field over a one-year period. Citizen scientists continue to monitor remote wildlife cameras in the rugged mountainous regions of this southern Arizona study area. Citizen science is often criticized because of skepticism from the scientific community regarding data integrity, quality control, and potentially biased data. This research aimed to exam the data integrity of citizen scientists by comparing it to the data analyzed by experts. When comparing the ability of citizen scientists and field team experts in sorting and correctly identifying wildlife, I found strong positive correlations between the levels of data quality. These high positive correlations indicate that, with training, citizen scientists are capable of accurately identifying wildlife from camera data nearly as well as the field team experts, and can be an excellent surrogate for experts. Connecting volunteers to the natural landscape through hands-on science research has the potential to create many positive experiences. Citizen science can increase participant’s knowledge of science, build trust and foster understanding, and can create a more informed public. Despite these benefits, data integrity is the most important aspect of research and data collected by non-scientists remains heavily scrutinized. Collaboration amongst professionals, educators, program designers, and data managers is necessary to ensure that project goals are achieved while maintaining scientific integrity. Continuing to examine citizen science programs is important to advance the field of citizen science and foster meaningful relationships between the public and scientists. This study provided a unique opportunity to use non-scientists to augment data collection and assessment in the scientific workplace to advance jaguar and ocelot conservation. We strongly believe that citizen scientists remain an underutilized resource for helping scientists collect and analyze data in a climate of reduced funding and increasing need for long-term monitoring.

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Bonney, Patrick. « Citizen science : Knowledge, networks and the boundaries of participation ». Thesis, Federation University Australia, 2020. http://researchonline.federation.edu.au/vital/access/HandleResolver/1959.17/175268.

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The water-related challenges facing humanity are complex and urgent. Although solutions are not always clear, involving the public in localised knowledge production and policy development is widely recognised as a critical part of this larger effort. Such public engagement is increasingly achieved through “citizen science”—a practice that involves non-professionals in scientific research and monitoring. Academic literature has recognised that, while citizen science is both important and necessary to strengthen environmental policy, its acceptance and successful implementation is a difficult governance challenge. Researchers agree that overcoming this challenge depends on the ability of volunteers, coordinators, scientists and decision-makers to work together to convert the potential of citizen science into practice. However, little is known about the collaborative relationships or the broader social contexts that shape and define the practice. To address these shortfalls, this thesis advances a conceptual framework for the relational analysis of citizen science that illustrates social networks and the boundaries between expert and community-based knowledge as critical sites of investigation. Through its multi-phase and mixed-methods research design, the findings of this thesis shed light on the contributions of citizen science to key waterway governance objectives, including the social, political and cultural factors that influence its acceptance and uptake in governance contexts. By unpacking the relational dimensions of citizen science, this thesis provides both theoretical and practice-based insights into how actors within and outside citizen science programs work together to achieve collective aims to engender stronger connections between science, society and policy. This thesis will benefit practitioners, policymakers and participatory advocates interested in achieving practical social change in efforts to understand and manage natural resources.
Doctor of Philosophy

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Wang, Alex Christopher. « Feature Factory : a collaborative, crowd-sourced machine learning system ». Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/100859.

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Thesis: M. Eng. in Computer Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2015.
This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.
Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (page 71).
In this thesis, I designed, implemented, and tested a machine learning learning system designed to crowd-source feature discovery called Feature Factory. Feature Factory provides a complete web-based platform for users to define, extract, and test features on any given machine learning problem. This project involved designing, implementing, and testing a proof-of-concept version of this platform. Creating the platform involved developing user-side infrastructure and system-side infrastructure. The user-side infrastructure required careful design decisions to provide users with a clear and concise interface and workflow. The system-side infrastructure involved constructing an automated feature aggregation, extraction, and testing pipeline that can be executed with a few simple commands. Testing was performed by presenting three different machine learning problems to test users via the user-side infrastructure of Feature Factory. Users were asked to write features for the three different machine learning problems as well as comment on the usability of the system. The systemside infrastructure was utilized to analyze the effectiveness and performance of the features written by the users.
by Alex Christopher Wang.
M. Eng. in Computer Science and Engineering

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Lee, Domin. « Using Global Objectives to Control Behaviors in Crowds ». The Ohio State University, 2008. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1205951787.

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Darch, Peter T. « When scientists meet the public : an investigation into citizen cyberscience ». Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4689b91f-a314-4957-900b-666d2394ebd6.

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Citizen Cyberscience Projects (CCPs) are projects mediated through the Internet, in which teams of scientists recruit members of the public (volunteers) to assist in scientific research, typically through the processing of large quantities of data. This thesis presents qualitative ethnographic case studies of the communities that have formed around two such projects, climateprediction.net and Galaxy Zoo. By considering these social actors in the broader contexts in which they are situated (historical, institutional, social, scientific), I discuss the co-shaping of the interests of these actors, the nature of the relationships amongst these actors, and the infrastructure of the projects and the purposes and nature of the scientific work performed. The thesis focusses on two relationships in particular. The first is that between scientists and volunteers, finding that, although scientists in both projects are concerned with treating volunteers with respect, there are nevertheless considerable differences between the projects. These are related to a number of interconnecting factors, including the particular contexts in which each project is embedded, the nature of the scientific work that volunteers are asked to undertake, the possibilities and challenges for the future development of the projects as perceived by the scientists, and the tools at the disposal of the respective teams of scientists for mediating relationships with volunteers. The second is amongst the volunteers themselves. This thesis argues that volunteers are heterogeneous, from disparate backgrounds, and that they sustain their involvement in CCPs for very different purposes. In particular, they seek to pursue these through the way they negotiate and construct their relationships with other volunteers, drawing on particular features of the project to do so. This thesis contributes to two fields. The first is to Citizen Cyberscience itself, with a view to improving the running of such projects. Some social studies have already been conducted of CCPs to this end, and this thesis both extends the analysis of some of these pre-existing studies and also problematizes aspects of CCPs that these studies had not considered. I discuss the significance of my findings for those involved in setting up and running a CCP, and present some recommendations for practice. The second field is Science and Technology Studies, in particular studies of public engagement with scientific and technological decision- and knowledge-making processes. The modes of engagement found in CCPs differ in key ways from those that have already been documented in the existing literature (in particular, different power relationships) and thus offer new ways of understanding how the public might be engaged successfully in such processes.

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Kreofsky, Tess Marie. « Isn’t Citizen Science a Hoot ? A Case-study Exploring the Effectiveness of Citizen Science as an Instrument to Teach the Nature of Science through a Local Nocturnal Owl-Monitoring Project ». PDXScholar, 2015. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/2645.

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Citizen science projects present a distinctive opportunity for professional and volunteer scientists to coordinate their efforts to gather unique sets of data that can benefit the scientific and local communities. These projects are assumed to be an effective educational tool to teach nature of science (NOS) to participants (Brossard, Lewenstein, Bonney, 2005). This case study evaluates the effectiveness of participation in a citizen science project as a way to learn about NOS. Through enhancement of the Tryon Creek Owl Monitoring Project the researcher reviewed the characteristics of a citizen science project that were thought to be necessary to impact the volunteers' knowledge of NOS. The study also explored the benefits and limitations to organizing the citizen science protect using the principles of action research. Analysis of participants' knowledge and the effectiveness of active research theory, was evaluated through pre- and post- questionnaires and interviews. Although volunteers were able to explore the core themes of NOS through actively engaging in the scientific process, they did not experience a statistically significant change in their demonstration of understanding. For a multitude of reasons, participants had a positive experience with the presence of an embedded researcher within the project. This case study supports the use of active research as a guide to ensure that within each project the needs of both the scientific community and the volunteer scientists are met.

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Korvala, T. (Tapio), et H. (Hannu) Raappana. « Open visual guidance system for mobile senior citizen ». Master's thesis, University of Oulu, 2015. http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:oulu-201505211603.

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The elderly citizen’s health care need some radical changes and improvements to alleviate the situation where the quality of service must be enhanced without overburdening the caregivers under the weighty workload. Much of research is done and many researchers all around the world emphasize the importance of assistive technologies. Current technological advancements in communication allow us to build systems which could be useful tools for the caregivers and allow the elderly to live more autonomous and active life. Offering stimulus to the elderly to experience with the technology could lessen the feel of social isolation and ameliorate the quality of service significantly. Shrinking electronics, mobiles and sensors do not bound the use only in homes or facilities, but allow the use in many different environments. While using technology of this kind, the caregivers could give guidance or follow the health status of a mobile elderly citizen in remote fashion and give help if needed. This thesis is also immersing in the matter by producing a Visual Guidance system that utilizes current mobile technology, actuators, sensors and uses a virtual reality as a communication medium between the caregivers and elderly citizens. The system consists of two different parts combined together to form a real-time communication system between caregivers and elderly citizen. The system uses Android smart phone’s built-in sensors to track the movement of the elderly. Those sensors are location based sensors such as GPS and acceleration and magnetometer sensors. This system provides an open map view of the world where the elderly citizen move. Also to improve the communication between the elderly and caregiver, video and audio communication has been used as one of our research aims. The caregiver can remotely use the smart phone to open video and audio communication with the elderly if needed. The system has been integrated with indicator base smart glasses so that when the elderly citizen are on the move, the caregiver can give directional advices on where and when to go. The authors used integration testing to evaluate the system and comparing the current system functions with the requirements of the system. Also the authors made sure that the delay with communication was small enough so it would be safe for the caregivers to communicate with the elderly citizen. For future work we suggested various actions such as integrating indicator based glasses with the Pupil Pro glasses, finding the most appropriate security solutions for the system and testing the system with real-life caregivers and elderly citizen.

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Decker, Hannah. « Citizen Science : Training Pet Dogs to Detect the Spotted Lanternfly ». Thesis, Virginia Tech, 2021. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/105006.

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Dogs have been used alongside humans as detection tools for centuries. There have been a multitude of studies published that demonstrate the accuracy and utility of detection dogs, more specifically conservation scent detection dogs. With ubiquitous agricultural threats in the United States, there is a need for a tool to help decrease the threat level. Pet dogs could be the answer. There are millions of pet dogs in the United States and with the success of the dog sport nose work there is the potential to use pet dogs as detection tools. In this proof-of-concept study, six pet dogs were trained to detect the spotted lanternfly. The dogs completed a training phase and five tests. The mean sensitivity of the six dogs, for the five tests, was 79.75%. The mean PPP of the six dogs, for all five tests, was 66.79%. The results suggest that these six dogs could be beneficial detection tools for the Spotted Lanternfly. Based on the findings in this study, pet dogs could be invaluable in the field of conservation scent detection.
Master of Science
Dogs have been used alongside humans as detection tools for centuries. There have been a multitude of studies published that demonstrate the accuracy and utility of detection dogs, more specifically conservation scent detection dogs. With ubiquitous agricultural threats in the United States, there is a need for a tool to help decrease the threat level. Pet dogs could be the answer. There are millions of pet dogs in the United States and with the success of the dog sport nose work there is the potential to use pet dogs as detection tools. In this proof-of-concept study, six pet dogs were trained to detect the spotted lanternfly. The dogs completed a training phase and five tests. The mean sensitivity, or proportion of correct detections, of the six dogs, for the five tests, was 79.75%. The mean PPP, or likelihood it is that the source of odor is present when a dog offers an alert; of the six dogs, for all five tests, was 66.79%. The results suggest that these six dogs could be beneficial detection tools for the Spotted Lanternfly. Based on the findings in this study, pet dogs could be invaluable in the field of conservation scent detection.

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Albertini, Elisa. « Citizen science e biodiversità : un’app per il monitoraggio del Mediterraneo ». Bachelor's thesis, Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna, 2021. http://amslaurea.unibo.it/24709/.

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Lo sfruttamento e l’inquinamento dovuti alla mano dell’uomo, unito ai cambiamenti climatici, come il surriscaldamento globale, hanno portato il Mar Mediterraneo a mutare il suo ricchissimo ma delicato ecosistema. Si è dunque reso necessario studiare con cura la situazione in cui si trova questo mare, in modo da raccogliere dati di vario genere (come il livello di inquinamento delle acque, la temperatura e le condizioni della fauna) per cercare di porre rimedio ai danni che lo stanno già modificando. Allo stesso tempo si è cercato anche di insegnare ai cittadini quanto sia importante rispettare il mare e averne cura, per questo si è ricorsi alla Citizen Science (CS), una tecnica, molto utilizzata nei progetti per la salvaguardia dell’ambiente, che ha appunto lo scopo di mettere in prima linea la cittadinanza in ambito scientifico. “Sentinelle del mare”, il punto di partenza di questo progetto di tesi, è appunto un progetto di CS che consiste nel far raccogliere dati sulla fauna marina, tramite un questionario, a dei sub amatoriali dopo le loro immersioni. È stata dunque sviluppata un’app mobile nativa, tramite React Native (tecnologia che permette di sviluppare un’unica applicazione per tutti i sistemi operativi), che informatizzasse il processo di raccolta dati, tramite un DataBase (realizzato mediante PostgreSQL) e delle API RESTful (collegate al DB tramite TypeORM e realizzate mediante NestJS), e che, allo stesso tempo, rendesse l’esperienza più interessante per gli utenti tramite alcune funzionalità di “gamification”.

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Sienknecht, Jos, Daniel Villafranca, Jennifer Martel et Sarah Lamb. « Promoting Sustainability through the Integration of Citizen Science and Ecotourism ». Thesis, Blekinge Tekniska Högskola, Institutionen för strategisk hållbar utveckling, 2018. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:bth-16447.

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This study aims to draw attention to a new concept within the tourism industry that integrates citizen science into an ecotourism product. The merge of citizen science and ecotourism shows potential to play a role in strategic sustainable development and to give ecotourism providers a competitive advantage in the market. However, the environmental and social benefits of this concept can only be realized if it is applied correctly. The framework for strategic for strategic sustainable development (FSSD) was used to address the complexity surrounding ecotourism and the use of citizen science. The study used a mixed method research design by conducting exploratory interviews, and then distributing a questionnaire to validate the qualitative findings. Results demonstrate that the merge of citizen science and ecotourism could contribute to sustainability through education, conservation, local community engagement, and the increased environmental awareness of the travellers. Additionally, it demonstrates that the integration of citizen science in an ecotourism product might create business benefits for the ecotourism providers in conjunction with a dynamic learning experience for the consumer. This study makes adaptions to a widely used citizen science toolkit and recommends appropriate changes to the process in order to ensure that it is effective for ecotourism providers while incorporating sustainability throughout the product design phase.

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Yang, Haofan. « Reputation modelling in citizen science for environmental acoustic data analysis ». Thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 2012. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/54657/1/Haofan_Yang_Thesis.pdf.

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Citizen Science projects are initiatives in which members of the general public participate in scientific research projects and perform or manage research-related tasks such as data collection and/or data annotation. Citizen Science is technologically possible and scientifically significant. However, as the gathered information is from the crowd, the data quality is always hard to manage. There are many ways to manage data quality, and reputation management is one of the common approaches. In recent year, many research teams have deployed many audio or image sensors in natural environment in order to monitor the status of animals or plants. The collected data will be analysed by ecologists. However, as the amount of collected data is exceedingly huge and the number of ecologists is very limited, it is impossible for scientists to manually analyse all these data. The functions of existing automated tools to process the data are still very limited and the results are still not very accurate. Therefore, researchers have turned to recruiting general citizens who are interested in helping scientific research to do the pre-processing tasks such as species tagging. Although research teams can save time and money by recruiting general citizens to volunteer their time and skills to help data analysis, the reliability of contributed data varies a lot. Therefore, this research aims to investigate techniques to enhance the reliability of data contributed by general citizens in scientific research projects especially for acoustic sensing projects. In particular, we aim to investigate how to use reputation management to enhance data reliability. Reputation systems have been used to solve the uncertainty and improve data quality in many marketing and E-Commerce domains. The commercial organizations which have chosen to embrace the reputation management and implement the technology have gained many benefits. Data quality issues are significant to the domain of Citizen Science due to the quantity and diversity of people and devices involved. However, research on reputation management in this area is relatively new. We therefore start our investigation by examining existing reputation systems in different domains. Then we design novel reputation management approaches for Citizen Science projects to categorise participants and data. We have investigated some critical elements which may influence data reliability in Citizen Science projects. These elements include personal information such as location and education and performance information such as the ability to recognise certain bird calls. The designed reputation framework is evaluated by a series of experiments involving many participants for collecting and interpreting data, in particular, environmental acoustic data. Our research in exploring the advantages of reputation management in Citizen Science (or crowdsourcing in general) will help increase awareness among organizations that are unacquainted with its potential benefits.

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Deng, C. (Canrong). « Multi user support for senior citizen visual guidance system ». Master's thesis, University of Oulu, 2016. http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:oulu-201603251353.

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Due to the population aging phenomenon, the working-age population will decline in the future while the seniors’ quality of life can decline. A lot of research has been done and many of researchers figure out modern ICT and mobile technology needs to shoulder more responsibility in elderly care. The benefit of science and technology should be brought to senior citizens’ life. Moreover, the smartphone ownership rate has been increasing in recent years, espe- cially the percentage of Android phone ownership. Because elders will take smart- phone everywhere, installing an application in senior citizen’s Android phone is a good way to track their movements. The caregivers could give guidance remotely to elders based on their location and surrounding environment scene by using mobile technology of this kind. The multi user support for senior citizen visual guidance system consists of five components: Android phone, Pupil headset, Indicator-based Glasses, OldBirds and web server part. The system uses the Pupil headset to capture senior citizen’s font view and transfer it to OldBirds part which is controlled by caregivers. Furthermore, the Indicator-based glasses are used to show the guidance orders given by remotely caregivers. The web server part is transfer station between Android phone and OldBirds part. Google Cloud Messaging service has already been integrated into this system so that caregivers can directly give guidance orders to senior citizens about when and where to go. For future work I suggest, from the hardware perspective, to connect Pupil headset’s world camera and eye camera together by a USB hub. Furthermore, I recommend to combine Pupil headset and Indicator-based glasses together to remove the need for Bluetooth connection.

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Schneer, Benjamin H. « How Electoral Institutions Shape Citizen Participation and Legislative Behavior ». Thesis, Harvard University, 2016. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:33493580.

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The electoral system is often treated as fixed, but throughout U.S. history significant changes in electoral institutions, or in political conditions dictated by electoral institutions, make it possible to identify more precisely the role that the electoral system plays in the democratic process. This dissertation examines three related questions, each focusing on an aspect of the influence of electoral rules on political behavior. How has the ability to directly elect representatives influenced other forms of citizen engagement with government? How has competitiveness influenced voter turnout? Finally, when separate elections lead to differences in partisan control over the branches of government, what is the effect on policymaking in Congress? The first chapter shows that petitioning campaigns have historically substituted for the communication and accountability obtained through direct elections. I estimate that rates of petitioning to the Senate declined by 30% when the passage of the 17th Amendment ended the practice of indirect election by state legislatures and replaced it with direct elections. The implication is that electoral reforms meant to improve representation may weaken other ties between citizens and lawmakers. The second chapter examines the relationship between electoral competition and turnout. Past research has found that citizens vote at higher rates in response to closer elections, either through instrumental voting at the individual level or through voter mobilization by elites. In contrast, this chapter demonstrates that citizens living in competitive congressional districts differ markedly from those in uncompetitive districts along a range of dimensions other than turnout. Using an individual panel based on voter files from all 50 states and exploiting variation in competitiveness induced by the 2012 redistricting cycle yields a precisely estimated null effect of competitiveness on turnout. The third chapter re-examines whether divided government reduces legislative productivity. After developing the most comprehensive database to date of significant acts of Congress---from 1789-2010---this chapter shows that unified control corresponds with one additional significant act passed per Congress in the 19th Century and four additional such acts in the 20th Century. However, party control of government cannot explain the broad historical trends in the rate at which Congress passes significant legislation.
Government

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Miller, Andrew Cesare. « The information game : police-citizen cooperation in communities with criminal groups ». Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2020. https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/128634.

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Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Political Science, May, 2020
Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 312-339).
Criminal groups -- gangs, mafias, and drug cartels, among others --
likely cause more deaths than interstate war, insurgency, and terrorism combined. This violence and the lack of accountability for perpetrators present a major challenge to states' central mandates of providing public safety and administering justice. States fall short of their mandates, in part because they struggle to gain cooperation from citizens. This study is about what I call The Information Game: the competition between the police, which want citizens to come forward with information about violence, and criminal groups, which want citizens to stay silent. I present cycle of silence theory, which posits that collective misperceptions prevent communities from reaching their full potential of police-citizen cooperation. Akin to terrorism, fear generated by criminal group violence makes retaliation appear to be more likely than it is.
The violence has the underappreciated but potent second order effect of pushing citizens who are willing to cooperate to hide their disposition from others. Cooperation thus appears to citizens to be less of a norm than it is. I also take new methodological approaches -- namely, fielding the first large-scale virtual reality experiment --
to test realistically and ethically strategies aimed at promoting cooperation. The results show that providing access to anonymous tip lines, creating awareness of community cooperation norms, and in some circumstances, exposing citizens to police officers of the same ethnicity increase citizen information-sharing with the police. Employing a multi-method research design, this study draws on original surveys in Baltimore, Maryland (N=650) and Lagos, Nigeria (N=1,025) as well as proprietary survey data of criminal justice experts (N=2,700) and citizens (N=109,000) in 113 countries provided by the World Justice Project. I pair the quantitative analysis with first-hand observation as well as interviews with more than 150 citizens, state authorities, and criminal group affiliates.
by Andrew Cesare Miller.
Ph. D.
Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Political Science

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Solmaz, Berkan. « Holistic Representations for Activities and Crowd Behaviors ». Doctoral diss., University of Central Florida, 2013. http://digital.library.ucf.edu/cdm/ref/collection/ETD/id/5870.

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In this dissertation, we address the problem of analyzing the activities of people in a variety of scenarios, this is commonly encountered in vision applications. The overarching goal is to devise new representations for the activities, in settings where individuals or a number of people may take a part in specific activities. Different types of activities can be performed by either an individual at the fine level or by several people constituting a crowd at the coarse level. We take into account the domain specific information for modeling these activities. The summary of the proposed solutions is presented in the following. The holistic description of videos is appealing for visual detection and classification tasks for several reasons including capturing the spatial relations between the scene components, simplicity, and performance [1, 2, 3]. First, we present a holistic (global) frequency spectrum based descriptor for representing the atomic actions performed by individuals such as: bench pressing, diving, hand waving, boxing, playing guitar, mixing, jumping, horse riding, hula hooping etc. We model and learn these individual actions for classifying complex user uploaded videos. Our method bypasses the detection of interest points, the extraction of local video descriptors and the quantization of local descriptors into a code book; it represents each video sequence as a single feature vector. This holistic feature vector is computed by applying a bank of 3-D spatio-temporal filters on the frequency spectrum of a video sequence; hence it integrates the information about the motion and scene structure. We tested our approach on two of the most challenging datasets, UCF50 [4] and HMDB51 [5], and obtained promising results which demonstrates the robustness and the discriminative power of our holistic video descriptor for classifying videos of various realistic actions. In the above approach, a holistic feature vector of a video clip is acquired by dividing the video into spatio-temporal blocks then concatenating the features of the individual blocks together. However, such a holistic representation blindly incorporates all the video regions regardless of their contribution in classification. Next, we present an approach which improves the performance of the holistic descriptors for activity recognition. In our novel method, we improve the holistic descriptors by discovering the discriminative video blocks. We measure the discriminativity of a block by examining its response to a pre-learned support vector machine model. In particular, a block is considered discriminative if it responds positively for positive training samples, and negatively for negative training samples. We pose the problem of finding the optimal blocks as a problem of selecting a sparse set of blocks, which maximizes the total classifier discriminativity. Through a detailed set of experiments on benchmark datasets [6, 7, 8, 9, 5, 10], we show that our method discovers the useful regions in the videos and eliminates the ones which are confusing for classification, which results in significant performance improvement over the state-of-the-art. In contrast to the scenes where an individual performs a primitive action, there may be scenes with several people, where crowd behaviors may take place. For these types of scenes the traditional approaches for recognition will not work due to severe occlusion and computational requirements. The number of videos is limited and the scenes are complicated, hence learning these behaviors is not feasible. For this problem, we present a novel approach, based on the optical flow in a video sequence, for identifying five specific and common crowd behaviors in visual scenes. In the algorithm, the scene is overlaid by a grid of particles, initializing a dynamical system which is derived from the optical flow. Numerical integration of the optical flow provides particle trajectories that represent the motion in the scene. Linearization of the dynamical system allows a simple and practical analysis and classification of the behavior through the Jacobian matrix. Essentially, the eigenvalues of this matrix are used to determine the dynamic stability of points in the flow and each type of stability corresponds to one of the five crowd behaviors. The identified crowd behaviors are (1) bottlenecks: where many pedestrians/vehicles from various points in the scene are entering through one narrow passage, (2) fountainheads: where many pedestrians/vehicles are emerging from a narrow passage only to separate in many directions, (3) lanes: where many pedestrians/vehicles are moving at the same speeds in the same direction, (4) arches or rings: where the collective motion is curved or circular, and (5) blocking: where there is a opposing motion and desired movement of groups of pedestrians is somehow prohibited. The implementation requires identifying a region of interest in the scene, and checking the eigenvalues of the Jacobian matrix in that region to determine the type of flow, that corresponds to various well-defined crowd behaviors. The eigenvalues are only considered in these regions of interest, consistent with the linear approximation and the implied behaviors. Since changes in eigenvalues can mean changes in stability, corresponding to changes in behavior, we can repeat the algorithm over clips of long video sequences to locate changes in behavior. This method was tested on over real videos representing crowd and traffic scenes.
Ph.D.
Doctorate
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Engineering and Computer Science
Electrical Engineering

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Zhang, Qingpeng. « Analyzing Cyber-Enabled Social Movement Organizations : A Case Study with Crowd-Powered Search ». Diss., The University of Arizona, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/265358.

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The advances in social media and social computing technologies have dramatically changed the way through which people interact, organize, and collaborate. The use of social media also makes the large-scale data revealing human behavior accessible to researchers and practitioners. The analysis and modeling of social networks formed from relatively stable online communities have been extensively studied. The research on the structural and dynamical patterns of large-scale crowds motivated by accomplishing common goals, named the cyber movement organizations (CMO) or cyber-enabled social movement organizations (CeSMO), however, is still limited to anecdotal case studies. This research is one of the first steps towards the understanding of the CMO/CeSMO based on real data collected from online social media.The focus of my research is on the study of an important type of CMO/CeSMO, the crowd-powered search behavior (also known as human flesh search, HFS), in which a large number of Web users voluntarily gathered together to find out the truth of an event or the information of a person that could not be identified by one single person or simple online searches. In this research, I have collected a comprehensive data-set of HFS. I first introduce the phenomenon of HFS and reviewed the study of online social groups/communities. Then, I present the empirical studies of both individual HFS episodes and aggregated HFS communities, and unveiled their unique topological properties. Based on the empirical findings, I propose two models to simulate evolution and topology of individual HFS networks. I conclude the dissertation with discussions of future research of CMO/CeSMO.

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Tansey, Christine. « The cues, responses to temperature and potential for mismatch in UK plant phenology ». Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/25826.

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Changes in phenology are often cited as a key biotic impact of climate change. Consequently, understanding the major environmental cues and responses to those cues in different species is important for making predictions about the future impacts and ecological implications of changing phenology. In this thesis, I set out to explore the phenological cues, mechanisms of response to temperature and the potential for interacting species to experience phenological mismatch in a range of UK plants. To do this, I utilised phenological records from two citizen science schemes; the well-established Nature’s Calendar, which collects observations for the UK Phenology Network (UKPN), and Track a Tree, a novel project I set up specifically to examine the phenology of interacting plant species in UK woodlands. I first assessed the ability of plasticity to track shifts in the optimum phenology for 22 plant species. I employed a statistical approach to estimate the plasticity and temperature sensitivity of the phenological optimum for leafing and flowering dates obtained from the UKPN. In identifying the most important cues I found that all species are sensitive to spring forcing temperatures, with plastic responses ranging from -3 to -8 days °C-1. Chilling temperatures in autumn/winter and photoperiod were important in species with early and late phenology, respectively. In seven species, plasticity was sufficient to track geographic variation in the optimum phenology. In four species, plasticity did not track the optimum, which is consistent with clinal local adaptation to temperature, and which could place phenology under directional selection in a changing climate. I then performed a phylogenetic comparative analysis on the median phenology and estimates of plasticity and local adaptation for the 22 species analysed previously. I found that phenological event (leafing or flowering) and growth form (woody or herbaceous perennial) predicted plasticity in phenological response. These traits may help inform future predictions of phenological responses to temperature. In contrast, the median date of phenology and clinal local adaptation over latitude were not predicted by any of the ecological traits considered. I next used records from the Track a Tree project to examine the relative phenology of canopy tree and understorey flowering species across UK woodlands. I found that first leafing and peak flowering of focal species pairs were correlated over space, and that the time between canopy leafing and the ground flora flowering (relative phenology) was spatially consistent. Relative phenology of two canopy tree species pairs was spatially consistent, but for a native versus non-native tree species pair the relationship varied over space (with a slope close to 0). If temperature-mediated plasticity determines these species’ phenology, my results suggest understorey flowering may be able to track canopy leafing in future, maintaining shading interactions. Finally, I used the Track a Tree data to partition the variance in phenology for seven tree species, and test what predicts variation in oak and birch. I found that the contributors to variance differ among tree species, with spatial variables important, and within site variance low, for all species except sycamore. The low intraspecific within-site variance suggests that some species may have a limited capacity for phenological buffering. These findings contribute to understanding what impacts on the phenological distribution of different species, an important requirement for assessing the phenological buffering of mismatch. In this thesis, I broadened the range of approaches that can be used to understand plant phenology in a changing climate. I demonstrated the value of employing novel statistical methods to analyse existing phenology data and the utility of hypothesis driven citizen science for predicting phenological shifts and the subsequent ecological implications for interacting species.

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Mason, Aaron D. « Monitoring individual animals through a collaborative crowdsourcing and citizen science platform ». Thesis, University of Surrey, 2016. http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/810995/.

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Improvements in communication technology means that increasing numbers of people around the world can share information with increasing ease. This information is forming knowledge in forms that was not previously conventionally possible. It is enabling new communities to be formed. This research aimed to determine how this data could be exploited and combined with additional complementary tools to enable automated large-scale non-intrusive monitoring of wildlife, and in particular keystone species. Three proof-of-concept research studies explored automated camera traps, citizen science and large-scale crowdsourcing to determine the potential of a system that combines this technology and its use for automated monitoring of wild animals. The results demonstrated that internet-connected camera traps are capable of collecting valuable visual data at a large-scale. However, for keystone species, such as tigers, the scale required for monitoring presents technical and economic challenges. The participation of citizen scientists to collect and analyse data demonstrated a potential monitoring mechanism. However, the volume of data provided for such a focused practice proved insufficient for accurate large-scale monitoring. The Wildsense project, which used publicly-available image data from the Web as its primary data source demonstrated that there is additional data available that can be processed with the participation of citizen scientists. The popularity and overall interest towards this project showed that crowdsourcing is a viable method for collecting relevant data for animal monitoring. It was concluded that the proof-of-concept experiments completed provided evidence that there is a potential to monitor individual animals through an automated approach and a system architecture is proposed. There is potential for automated large scale monitoring using the proposed framework. However, there are significant challenges to overcome and multiple directions for future work are recommended for exploration.

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L'Ecuyer, François. « Naturewatch Canada : Metadata Analysis for a Citizen-Science Based Monitoring Program ». Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/35883.

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NatureWatch Canada, a citizen science program, collects and analyses data pertaining to plant phenology, frog species and ice coverage over water bodies in Canada to monitor trends through time and space in relation to climate change. An important question is whether this database is currently usable to infer environmental changes through space and time. This thesis presents a metadata analysis of the Nature Watch database in order to identify the spatial validity, quality, reliability and usability of the current data. We first explore citizen science through a review of the literature, followed by a detailed analysis of the content of the database. We also produce an example Newsletter for each module to illustrate some of the current trends in the data. The Frogwatch Newsletter shows how weather conditions in 2001 may have favored a population spurt of Leopard frogs resulting from more spawning ponds essential for this species. Next the Plantwatch Newsletter reveals that an increase in Aspen poplar and Prairie crocus in 2002 may have been due to fires during the preceding years. Lastly, the Icewatch Newsletter shows how ice formation, but not melt, reveals a clear trend of occurring 17 days later over the last 100 years with a stronger increase starting in the sixties for Western Ontario. In summary, this thesis presents a detailed metadata analysis of the Naturewatch database in order to provide recommendations for its improvement in the future. Improving programs like Naturewatch Canada is important to monitoring climate and ecological changes that could be applied throughout the Canadian North which are not currently well represented in this database.

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Parfitt, Ian. « Citizen science in conservation biology : best practices in the geoweb era ». Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/44346.

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Conservation biology emerged as an activist discipline in the 1980s in response to increasing evidence that Earth is undergoing a biodiversity crisis. Building on foundations of biological science and applied resource management methods, this new discipline called upon its practitioners to both undertake scientific research to improve understanding of all species and ecosystems, and to take social and political action to protect and enhance endangered biodiversity. In the current era of declining budgets for biodiversity research and management, volunteer citizen science is gaining recognition as an important strategy for expanding and extending the work of embattled professional conservation biologists. New technologies such as handheld computers, GPS, GIS, interactive map services, and the internet, and the wide-spread availability, adoption and adaptation of these technologies by the general public, have created an environment where citizens can be rapidly mobilized to gather, process, and communicate data in support of conservation biology’s twin goals. In this thesis I explore citizen science within conservation biology and within the concept of the GeoWeb. I trace the history of citizen science in biology since the late 1800s to the current day, to better understand the practice and its contribution to conservation science. I find that citizen science is often employed to undertake research at large spatial scales, and that often location is a key attribute of the data citizens gather; as a result, the infrastructure and methods of the GeoWeb are fundamental to many citizen science projects. In the spirit of conservation biology, I pair my research of citizen science with the assembly of a set of best practices for increasing the impact of the practice on the conservation agenda, and then evaluate twelve current citizen science projects currently underway in British Columbia against these practices. I conclude that citizen participation in biological science furthers both of conservation biology’s goals: it both increases our body of knowledge about biodiversity, and helps to develop an informed and empowered constituency for conservation action and ecologically sustainable stewardship.

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Curtis, Vickie. « Online citizen science projects : an exploration of motivation, contribution and participation ». Thesis, Open University, 2015. http://oro.open.ac.uk/42239/.

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The number of online citizen science projects has increased significantly over the past decade, yet some aspects of participation are poorly understood as is the motivation behind the involvement of the scientists who set up these projects, and the citizen scientists who take part. This thesis explores three different online citizen science projects (Foldit, Folding@home and Planet Hunters) using a case study approach and data collected through online surveys, interviews and participant observation. It explores the motivations that initiate and sustain participation, and it examines the various ways individuals can contribute to these projects. It also investigates how participants (both professional scientists and citizen scientists) interact online. A number of theoretical models of motivation and participation are considered. While many individuals register to take part in these projects, only a small proportion become active participants. These active citizen scientist volunteers are motivated to participate because they want to make a contribution to science or have a background interest in science. Scientists set up these projects in order to get help analysing large volumes of data, particularly those that require human pattern recognition or problem-solving skills. The complexity of the project task and the presence of certain technological features can affect how participants interact with each other, and how they contribute. Tasks that are complex are more likely to present opportunities for cooperation and collaboration, and may foster the development of online communities of practice. The findings of this research suggest that online citizen science projects have been important in making scientific research more open for a number of distributed volunteers. These individuals have responded to the challenges presented by these projects, increasing their scientific and technical understanding, and self-organising into various roles and teams in order to produce new knowledge.

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Buchholz, Seth D. « Rapid Cyanotoxin Detection Technology in Routine Monitoring and Citizen Science Groups ». Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2021. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1616074976068045.

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Buckthal, Eric D. ebucktha. « JUICINESS IN CITIZEN SCIENCE COMPUTER GAMES : ANALYSIS OF A PROTOTYPICAL GAME ». DigitalCommons@CalPoly, 2014. https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/theses/1278.

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Incorporating the collective problem-solving skills of non-experts could ac- celerate the advancement of scientific research. Citizen science games leverage puzzles to present computationally difficult problems to players. Such games typ- ically map the scientific problem to game mechanics and visual feed-back helps players improve their solutions. Like games for entertainment, citizen science games intend to capture and retain player attention. “Juicy” game design refers to augmented visual feedback systems that give a game personality without modi- fying fundamental game mechanics. A “juicy” game feels alive and polished. This thesis explores the use of “juicy” game design applied to the citizen science genre. We present the results of a user study in its effect on player motivation with a prototypical citizen science game inspired by clustering-based E. coli bacterial strain analysis.

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Kruks-Wisner, Gabrielle K. « Claiming the state : citizen-state relations and service delivery in rural India ». Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/83760.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2013.
"February 2013." Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 271-281).
Who makes claims on the state and how? This dissertation examines the processes through which citizens seek to secure public resources from the state and, by extension, the patterns of participation and citizen-state relations that emerge. Using the case of rural India, I explore whether and how citizens navigate their local environments to demand public services such as drinking water, health services and education, or access to welfare and poverty reduction programs. My fieldwork in the state of Rajasthan, consisting of 400 in-depth interviews and a survey of 2210 households across 105 villages, reveals variation in the incidence and practice of claim-making, ranging from those who do not engage the state at all, to direct petitioning of officials, to strategies mediated through non-state actors and informal institutions. Such variation cannot be adequately explained by an individual's socioeconomic status, by the characteristics of formal institutions, or by levels of development in a locality. Rather, I find that claim-making practice is shaped by the degree to which a person is exposed to people and settings across such social and spatial lines. Through ties that extend beyond the immediate community and locality, a person encounters information and ideas about the state and its resources as well as an array of contacts that provide linkages to the state. Socio-spatial exposure across divisions of caste, class, neighborhood, or village expands both the opportunities and knowledge necessary for citizen-state engagement, increasing both the likelihood as well as the breadth of claim-making practice. These findings shed critical light on our understanding of both distributive politics (who gets what from the state) and democratic practice (who participates and how).
by Gabrielle K. Kruks-Wisner.
Ph.D.

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Luehrmann, Laura. « Officials face the masses : citizen contacting in Modern China / ». access full-text online access from Digital Dissertation Consortium, 2000. http://libweb.cityu.edu.hk/cgi-bin/er/db/ddcdiss.pl?9962428.

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Llorente, Lope Carolina 1989. « Analysis of citizen participation in science : perceptions of the different actors involved ». Doctoral thesis, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2020. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/670304.

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The main objective of this thesis is to improve understanding of citizen participation in science in Spain. Specifically, it analyses the characteristics of current participatory practices and the opinions and attitudes of two of the main actors involved (scientists and citizens). The research has been divided into three studies based on qualitative (semi-structured interviews) and quantitative (questionnaires) methodologies. The main results suggest that activities of citizen participation in science require solid scientific communication throughout the process, as well as prior planning and training (for participants and for researchers). The results indicate that Spanish researchers do not fully know their publics. However, scientists consider that they have a responsibility in science communication and public engagement activities. Spanish civil society organizations participate to a little extent in science and do not know their own potential to produce more socially relevant research.
Esta tesis tiene como objetivo principal mejorar la comprensión sobre la participación ciudadana en ciencia en España. En concreto, analiza las características de prácticas participativas actuales y las opiniones y actitudes de dos de los principales actores involucrados (científicos y ciudadanos). La investigación se ha dividido en tres estudios basados en metodologías cualitativas (entrevistas semiestructuradas) y cuantitativas (cuestionarios). Los principales resultados sugieren que las actividades de ciencia participativa necesitan una buena comunicación científica a lo largo de todo el proceso, así como planificación y formación previas (para los participantes y para los investigadores). Los resultados indican que los investigadores españoles no conocen del todo a su público. Sin embargo, consideran que tienen una responsabilidad en la comunicación de la ciencia y las actividades de public engagement. Las organizaciones de la sociedad civil española participan poco en ciencia y no conocen su propio potencial para producir una investigación socialmente más relevante.

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Angala, Hallo Angaleni Nameya. « Citizen science, treatment and microbial compliance monitoring in rainwater harvesting in Namibia ». Thesis, Rhodes University, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/62082.

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Bracey, Georgia L. « Teaching with Citizen Science| An Exploratory Study of Teachers' Motivations & ; Perceptions ». Thesis, University of Missouri - Saint Louis, 2018. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10791145.

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With the continued emphasis in the United States on science teaching reform as a way to increase science learning and the scientific literacy of all, the integration of informal science learning activities like citizen science is emerging as a possible way to enhance formal science teaching and learning. There is a limited but growing number of studies indicating that the general public is learning science content and process from participating in citizen science, but research in this area is just beginning and the use of citizen science projects by teachers in formal classroom settings has barely been examined at all. This qualitative study examined three research questions: 1) What motivates experienced middle school science teachers to use citizen science programs in their classrooms? 2) What do experienced middle school science teachers perceive to be the impact on their students as a result of using citizen science in their classrooms? and 3) What do experienced middle school science teachers perceive as the challenges in using citizen science in their classrooms? Twenty-two middle school teachers from across the United States were interviewed about their motivations and expectations regarding their use of citizen science projects in their classrooms. Using a basic thematic analysis, responses from these semi-structured interviews were coded and themes were developed. Findings indicated that teachers use citizen science to engage their students in authentic science experiences that make a contribution to science and society. Also, teachers perceive that citizen science activities broaden students’ perspectives and build their agency to make a difference in their environment. Teachers perceived two main challenges with citizen science: making the task meaningful and ensuring that students experience the whole scientific process. This study makes a start at understanding why teachers use citizen science and how they perceive it to impact their students.

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Armstrong, Zoey Nicole. « Modeling distributions of Cantharellus formosus using natural history and citizen science data ». Miami University / OhioLINK, 2021. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1619006107999476.

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Sprinks, James C. « Designing task workflows to ensure the best scientific outcomes in citizen science ». Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2017. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/42108/.

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Citizen science, or ‘public participation in scientific research’, can be described as research conducted, in whole or in part, by amateur or nonprofessional participants often through crowd-sourcing techniques. The advance of modern day internet technology that has made the world a more connected place has resulted in a surge of citizen science projects, especially online platforms which allow volunteers to take part in research in both an asynchronous and geographically abstract manner. Due to this increased interest, citizen science is becoming a distinct field of research in its own right beyond the original scientific problems it was devised to address. Although some of this research has considered interface HCI and functionality, there has been relatively little attention paid specifically to human factors issues. Through this work we attempt to address this shortfall, by considering citizen science as a form of ‘work’. Due to its similarities in terms of repetition with production lines of the early 20th century and more recently on-screen visual inspection tasks, some of the many decades of ergonomics research in this field are applied specifically to the virtual citizen science arena. We make a first step in considering how virtual citizen science systems can be better designed for the needs of the volunteer, exploring how manipulating task flow affects both the quality of information collected, and the volunteers’ experience of using the interface. A hierarchical task analysis of 12 Zooniverse projects revealed that the types of tasks, judgements and the way they are presented to the volunteer varies greatly, independent of the science discipline involved. Furthermore, through differing designs of the Zooniverse’s ‘Planet Four: Craters’ platform, it was shown that task workflow design factors such as autonomy, variety, task type and volunteer judgement required can influence the amount of data collected, the accuracy of this data and both volunteer engagement and motivation. Simpler tasks with fewer volunteer judgements required resulted in a significantly greater volume of data collected, however accuracy is affected with an increase of false-positive classifications. Volunteers reported a preference for greater autonomy and task variety, a stance reflected in the number of times they visited and returned to the platform, however this also significantly reduced the accuracy of classifications – both in terms of inter-participant agreement and expert judgement comparison. The interplay of task workflow factors and their effect has been shown to be a complex affair. Through the empirical data collected, a model has been derived predicting the influence of different task workflow configurations on classification numbers over time since a platforms’ launch. It demonstrates that when considering task workflow design, developers of future citizen science platforms will need to perform a balancing act. The importance of user engagement, the data needs of the science case and the resources that can be committed both in terms of time and data reduction will need to be weighed, and balanced with the realistic public reach and promotion the science case can be predicted to generate.

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Thèses sur le sujet « Crowd science.Citizen science »

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