October 31 2018 Update
In the past two months, we have been working on new analyses of our experiment images, and there is a role for some of you to help! We would also like to share our thoughts on how we would like to talk about this project and others we may do in the future!
Progress on images
In our last update, we mentioned we were going to re-analyze our participants’ images. We searched for a good place to conduct the image scoring, and found an academic institution where we’ve got a good chance to make it happen. We’re in the process of getting the activity approved, and if all goes well we plan to recruit students next week to do the scoring on November 10 and 11.
Next, we also said that we’re working with new collaborators on a digital analysis of the images. That is progressing well. We’re working with faculty and graduate students with experience in image analysis and machine learning. They reported to us Sunday that they trained a deep learning framework to tell the difference between the kernels, cobb, and background of the images with promising results. They have already analyzed 61 of the images. We are very excited because we can potentially include all the images in our experiment in this digital analysis, which we were not able to do before. And here’s where some of you can help us out.
To continue the digital image analysis, the ears, cobs, and kernels need to be digitally labeled. The images are uploaded to a crowdsourced labeling platform called Labelbox, and here’s a screenshot of what that looks like. By drawing boundaries around each part of the image, it helps the program learn to recognize each part of the corn. Labeling each image is like playing connect-the-dots on top of a picture that is already drawn, and takes a couple of minutes for each one. Volunteers can do as many images as they want to, will get credited for this in the paper, and might also learn something! If sounds like something you’d like to help with, please contact us at karl@biofortified.org. With enough help, it will get done in no time at all.
Citizen Science, or Community Science?
Finally, we would like to share some thoughts about how we describe this kind of project, as we prepare for publication. From the beginning, we’ve been calling this a Citizen Science project - a well-known name for research projects where anyone can participate and be a part of the research - not just professional scientists. We recently learned that we may be accidentally excluding some people who would want to participate, but for whom the term “citizen” does not necessarily fit. There are communities of immigrants to consider, people who are residents of the US but citizens of other countries, and people such as Native Americans where “citizenship” has different meanings.
While in the broadest sense, we consider everyone a citizen of this planet, we’re thinking about changing how we describe these projects to be more inclusive. For projects about biotechnology and other topics in food and agriculture, we would like to include people from these backgrounds as in some cases they may have unique perspectives, be more directly affected by the results, or have strong cultural connections to the subject. An alternate name for this kind of research is “Community Science”, and it has already appeared in publications about this kind of research. While we are proposing to shift our language to Community Science, Citizen Science is the most recognizable term, so we will likely use both in the foreseeable future
10th Anniversary of Biology Fortified!
Did you know it has been 10 years since we launched our site at Biofortified.org? To commemorate this occasion we’ve highlighted our most popular blog articles, written a story about our commitment to independence, launched a Halloween carving and costume contest, and created a limited edition T-shirt that you can get right here! Check out what we’ve got going on with our site, and have a happy Halloween!
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