Smarter Science: The Power of the Crowd!

CEE Autumn Symposium 2012

Smarter Science: The Power of the Crowd!

14th November 2012
Huxley Lecture Theater, Zoological Society Meeting Rooms, Zoological Society London NW1 4RY.
9am - 6pm.

Organizers: Prof. Kate Jones (University College London, Zoological Society of London), Prof. Jonathan Silvertown (Open University), Dr. Paul Jepson and Prof. Kathy Willis (Oxford University)

The way we do science is changing rapidly, as social media, gaming and using crowds to solve problems changes who can take part and how they can participate. Crowd-collected data are also posing new analytical and visualization challenges. Here we take a look at the current state of this area to draw lessons for the future of research in ecology, evolution and conservation.

The event is open to all interested and is free but we will have to charge £5 (£3 students) on the day for teas, coffees and biscuits. Posters and Demos welcome (you can fill out the details when you register).

Directions can be found here.

Please REGISTER here.

Confirmed Speakers

Crowd thinking: Phil Brohan (Met Office) Old Weather, Kate Jones (UCL, ZSL) Bat Detective

Crowd sensing: Jonathan Silvertown (Open University) TBC, Lucas Joppa (Microsoft Research) iNaturalist, Michael Pocock (CEH) Leaf Watch, John Tweddle (Natural History Museum) Bug Count

Crowd experiments: Bob MacCallum (Imperial College) DarwinTunes

Innovative approaches: Thore Graepel (Microsoft) Research Games, Chris Sandbrook (Cambridge University) Games for Nature

Crowd Tools: Jai Ranganathan (NCEAS) SciFund Challenge

Smarter Science - The Power of the Crowd!

CEE Autumn Symposium 2012

Smarter Science: The Power of the Crowd!

14th November 2012
Huxley Lecture Theater, Zoological Society Meeting Rooms, Zoological Society London NW1 4RY.
9am - 6pm.

Organizers: Prof. Kate Jones (University College London, Zoological Society of London), Prof. Jonathan Silvertown (Open University), Dr. Paul Jepson and Prof. Kathy Willis (Oxford University)

The way we do science is changing rapidly, as social media, gaming and using crowds to solve problems changes who can take part and how they can participate. Crowd-collected data are also posing new analytical and visualization challenges. Here we take a look at the current state of this area to draw lessons for the future of research in ecology, evolution and conservation.

The event is open to all interested and is free but we will have to charge £5 (£3 students) on the day for teas, coffees and biscuits. Posters and Demos welcome (you can fill out the details when you register).

Directions can be found here.

Please REGISTER here.

PROGRAMME

8:30-9:15AM COFFEE

9:15AM Introduction (Kate Jones)

Session One: Crowd sensing (Chair: Paul Jepson)

9:20AM Mike Dodd (Open University) Treezilla: The Monster Map of Trees: A new citizen science platform from the home of iSpot and the Evolution MegaLab.

9:40AM Michael Pocock (Centre for Ecology and Hydrology) One moth versus the crowd: the story of Conker Tree Science.

10AM John Tweddle, Poppy Lakeman Fraser and Lucy Robinson (Natural History Museum) OPAL Bugs Count: smarter science or just a bit of fun?

10:20AM Scott Laurie (Stanford University) iNaturalist - crowd sourcing biodiversity conservation.

10:40AM Alex Rogers (University of Southampton) Smartphone-based Biodiversity Monitoring: Mobilising the crowd in the hunt for the New Forest Cicada.

11 AM TEA AND COFFEE

11:20AM Toby Hammond (University of East Anglia) Ashtag – tracking fungal disease spread across the UK

Session Two: Innovative Approaches and Crowd Tools (Chair: Jonathan Silvertown)

11:40AM Matthias Stevens (UCL) Extreme Citizen Science: Concepts & Project

12PM Paul Jepson (Oxford University) Opti-hunting: a technology inspired vision for enrolling the hunting ‘crowd’ in conservation

12:20PM David Aanensen (Imperial College) EpiCollect

12:40PM Thore Graepel (Microsoft Research Cambridge) The Smarter Crowd: Measuring and Boosting Crowd Intelligence

1PM LUNCH (Posters and Demos)

2:00PM Chris Sandbrook (Cambridge University) Can digital games and virtual worlds help us to save nature?

Session Three: Crowd Thinking (Chair: Robin Freeman)

2:20PM Phil Brohan (Met Office) New uses for old weather

2:40PM Kate Jones (UCL, ZSL) Becoming Batman: using citizens to detect signals in 2 million files

3PM Bob MacCallum (Imperial College) DarwinTunes - a simple model of cultural evolution via crowd selection

3:20PM Kirsty Kemp, Greg Skolidis and Gabe Brostow (ZSL, UCL) Cameras for conservation at the bottom of deep blue sea

3:40P COFFEE AND TEA 

4PM Alasdair Davies (ZSL) Cameras in the cloud - citizen science of the future.

Session Four: Crowd Management (Chair: Kathy Willis)

4.20PM Nadia Richman (Zoological Society of London) Reliability of crowd memory

4.40PM Lucas Joppa (Microsoft Research Cambridge) Motivating the crowd

5PM Jonathan Silvertown (Open University) Who is an expert? The iSpot solution

5:20PM Concluding Remarks (Kate Jones) 

5:30PM  Drinks at The Albert Pub, NW1 8JR

Extreme Animals Half-Term Activities and other events at The Grant Museum

Extreme Animals Half-Term Activities

Wednesday 6th - Friday 8th June, drop in 1pm-5pm 

Come and meet some of the biggest, smallest, heaviest, lightest, strongest, cutest, ugliest, weirdest and wildest animals in the Grant Museum. Through our free hands-on specimen-based activities explore some of the animal record-breakers for half-term.
 

Part of Silly Season at the Grant Museum. This event is free and there is no need to book.

Current exhibition…

Buried on Campus

23^rd April – 13^th July, Mon-Fri 1-5pm

A huge mass of human bones was discovered in UCL during construction work in 2010. This installation displays the investigations undertaken to discover what they are and why they were buried. Remains of at least 84 individual people and many animals have been identified. Uncover where they came from and what we can learn from them in this unusual exhibition co-curated by UCL forensic anatomists and osteologists.

Admission is free and there is no need to book.

Link to Grant Museum

CEE Seminar, Weds 23 May at 5pm: Title: ‘Reconstruction of diet in extinct mammals –Methods, limits, and a case study: the cave bear Ursus spelaeus’

Please note the following GEE/CEE Seminar taking on Weds 23 May at 5pm

Venue:  UCL AV Hill LT.

All are welcome.

Speaker: Stephane Peigne,  Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris

Web: http://www2.mnhn.fr/hdt203/info/peigne.php

Host: Anjali Goswami

 

Title: ‘Reconstruction of diet in extinct mammals –Methods, limits, and a case study: the cave bear Ursus spelaeus’

Diet is an important trait of the ecology of organisms that is fundamental to study trophic interaction in a food web. In extinct animals also, this is one of the most frequently reconstructed traits. For palaeontologists, reconstructing the diet of an extinct species serves as a basis of discussion or for inferences on, e.g., its trophic relationships, the reasons of its evolutionary success or extinction, etc. However, estimated diet can be biased as a result of sampling or methodologies and this bias obviously is more pronounced for extinct than for extant organisms. As a paleontologist, I frequently investigate dietary preferences of extinct carnivorous mammals, my studied group. As many colleagues, I base my work almost exclusively on data obtained from extant relatives of species or families under study.

After shortly reviewing several methods to reconstruct the diet of extinct mammals, I will present a case study, the diet of the cave bear Ursus spelaeus. The diet of cave bears was greatly debated, although most previous morphological and isotopic studies indicate that cave bear diet was mostly vegetarian. This result is surprising given energetic constraints for an animal that reached the size of the largest extant brown bears. With the great progress of the nutritional ecology in the last decades, ecologists have now a large amount of data on the nutritional ecology of brown bears. Given this knowledge, it is quite difficult, at least for me and some other colleagues, to believe that cave bears may rely mainly on vegetarian matter. For this reason, we then decided to re-investigate the cave bear diet and to test the vegetarian hypothesis by using dental microwear analysis on an archeological, well-dated sample of individuals from several horizons of a Belgian cave. Our results demonstrate that cave bears were not strictly vegetarian, especially before dormancy, but that they had a mixed diet including a large array of food items. This result also indicates that studies only based on multiple approaches (morphology, geochemistry, dental microwear analysis) may provide a rather complete knowledge of the biology of an extinct species.

Annual Thackray Lecture: 28 March 5pm, “The Piltdown Man Hoax”.

The Natural History Museum Students’ Association would like to invite you to annual Thackray Lecture:

Professor Chris Stringer  “The Piltdown Man Hoax”.

Wednesday 28^th March 5pm Flett Theatre

Followed by a wine reception

The Thackray lecture forms the finale to the NHM Student Conference taking place on 27^th and 28^th March (Flett Theatre from 9:30am) which showcases student research at the NHM through a series of talks and poster sessions-feel free to pop along!



The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) on the Big Screen, Tues 20 Mar 6:30pm

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) on the Big Screen

JZ Young Theatre, Anatomy Building, UCL, Gower Street, Tuesday 20^th March, 6.30pm

This dinosaur classic follows a terrifying beast accidentally resurrected following nuclear testing as it rampages through America. It is said to be one of the inspirations for Godzilla. The trailers ask “Are we delving into mysteries we weren't meant to know?", “Who know what waits for us in nature's no-man's land?"

Any fan of dinosaurs, films, 1950s melodrama and monsters rising from the ocean can’t afford to miss this legendary masterpiece.

Film buff and science historian Dr Joe Cain (UCL Science and Technology Studies) will introduce the film.

Part of the Humanimals Season at the Grant Museum. Following the event join us for a free glass of wine in a private view of the Museum. Admission is free and there is no need to book.

All the best

Jack Ashby

Manager

Grant Museum of Zoology

Rockefeller Building

University College London

21 University Street

London WC1E 6DE

Web: www.grant.museum.ucl.ac.uk

Blog: https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/museums/

020 3108 2052 (or 52052 from within UCL)

j.ashby@ucl.ac.uk

http://www.facebook.com/pages/UCL-Museums-and-Collections/352538109391

http://twitter.com/@GrantMuseum

Seminar by Dr Sebastian Shimeld, 14 Mar, cancelled with apologies

14 March 2012

Dear Colleagues

Dr Paola Oliveri has just received an e-mail from today’s seminar speaker, Dr Sebastian Shimeld advising that sudden family reasons will prevent him from giving his seminar this evening, however we will re-schedule it. 

With apologies for the short-notice.

Best regards

Jane

Jane M Dempster

Executive Officer to Professor Andrew Pomiankowski, Head of Research Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment, and to

Professor Gabriel Waksman, Head of Research Department of Structural and Molecular Biology

& CEE Administrator

Darwin Building (Room 111),  Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT

Tel: 020 7679 2246 (internal xt 32246)

Fax:  020 7679 7193

E-mail: j.dempster@ucl.ac.uk

Departmental websites: 

GEE:   http://www.ucl.ac.uk/gee

SMB: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/smb/

CEE:  http://www.ceevol.co.uk/

The importance of individual differences for evolutionary game theory and the evolution of cooperation

Tuesday 13 March 2012,  Tuesday 4.30-6.00pm (tea from 4.00 pm)

UCL Anthropology department is hosting a talk by John McNamara entitled:

The importance of individual differences for evolutionary game theory and the evolution of cooperation

Venue:   Daryll Forde Seminar Room, Anthropology Building, 14 Taviton St, Off Gordon Sq 

Further details here:  http://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/seminar_series/biological-anthropology-seminar-series

All CEE Members are welcome!

CEE/GEE SEMINAR, Weds 7 March 2012 at 5pm, at UCL

 

THE RED QUEEN IN ACTION
IN DAPHNIA-PARASITE INTERACTIONS

Dr Ellen Decaestecker

(University of Leuven)

5 pm – 6pm

Wednesday, 7 March 2012

Host:  Dr Max Reuter, GEE

Please contact Dr. Reuter (m.reuter@ucl.ac.uk) if you want to meet

Dr Decaestecker

 Medical Sciences AV Hill Lecture Theatre, UCL

ALL ARE WELCOME! 

For further details, visit: http://www.ceevol.co.uk   or email: cee@ucl.ac.uk

CEE Spring Symposium 2011: Integrating Ecology into Macroevolutionary Research

 We warmly invite you to a CEE Symposium on "Integrating Ecology into Macroevolutionary Research" to be held at the Zoological Society of London meeting rooms on 9th March (9am - 6pm).

The schedule of speakers includes:

• Luke Harmon (University of Idaho) New Frontiers for the Comparative Analysis of Adaptive Radiations
• Gavin Thomas (Bristol University) Can models of trait evolution tell us anything about the evolutionary process?
• Sam Turvey (Zoological Society London) What can the recent fossil record actually tell us about past and present human-caused extinction?
• James Rosindell (Leeds University) Neutral theory and macroevolution
• Lynsey McInnes (Imperial College) Evolution and ecology of the species:area relationship in mammals
• Bill Baker (Kew Gardens, London) Museum model diversification of palms in the earliest tropical rain forests
• Anjali Goswami (University College London) Convergence, competition, and constraints: case studies in carnivore evolution
• Andy Purvis (Imperial College) Species ecology and macroevolutionary dynamics of Cenozoic planktonic foraminifera
• Helene Morlon (CNRS, Paris) Reconciling molecular phylogenies with the fossil record
• Kanchon Dasmahapatra (University College London) Phylogenetic and mimetic relationships in Neotropical butterflies
• Tim Barraclough (Imperial College) Are there evolutionarily significant units of diversity above the level of species?

To register for the symposium and to receive further updates on the schedule for the day please email Lynsey McInnes. Attendance will cost £5.00, payable on the day, to cover refreshments.

Lynsey McInnes and Ally Phillimore (organisers)