Foldit: gaming for science
Have you ever thought that you could save human lives by playing videogames?
Apparently we can! You won’t feel guilty anymore for having wasted an afternoon playing videogames, if you play this particular game: Foldit.
Foldit represents one of the most clever way to help science to find a solution for some of the most serious medical issues as finding a cure for cancer, HIV and Alzheimer. How does it work?
The idea behind Foldit is similar to the one of the Seti project, in which everyone can contribute to the research of ET Intelligence by “sharing” his PC computational power online, but it’s in my opinion even more appealing, since it’s involving users’ direct participation.
Foldit is a videogame developed by the Center for Game Science at University of Washington in collaboration with the UW Department of Biochemistry in order to solve one of the hardest riddle in biology: proteins folding. For a scientist, knowing the shape and structure of a protein is essential to understand how it works and, in the case of a viral protein how to eradicate it, but unfortunately the only way to figure it out is by “random attempts”, which takes a lot of time and computational power.
That’s why the team came up with the idea of creating a videogame that allowed to “crowdsource” the problem: with Foldit every player just need a bit of pattern-recognition and puzzle solving abilities to contribute to the study of a certain protein by solving the puzzles contained in the videogame, and providing the team with new solutions.
As a matter of fact, Foldit has already achieved great recognition by the scientific community: for example, in September 2011 videogamers where able to solve a molecular puzzle that pined scientists for more than a decade. They were able to find a solution it in less than 10 days, and gave a great contribution to the research of a cure for HIV.
This makes us understand the power of crowdsourcing, and how scientific progress can be boosted by crowd-participation. You might want to try it yourselves now!
If you’re interested, you can find more information at the official website here: http://fold.it/portal/
Having seen the power of such a technology, in what other fields do you think it can become useful? Big data maybe? 🙂
Cheers,
Giovanni
Opensource Hardware with Arduino!
Hi everyone!
Today I’d like to introduce you to a new technology I came across with while watching some conferences on TED: Arduino.
First of all a little premise: I know usually us Bimmers try to focus on how to enhance business performance through IT-exploitation, and in most of the cases that has something to do with some kind of new software solution, so I might go a little out of scope by presenting you this new idea, but still, I’d like to wonder if somehow it can be possible to develop any kind of hardware-driven solution as well in order to improve business performance.
So, the project I’m talking about is called Arduino, and in my opinion it’s probably going to have a disruptive impact on the engineering environment of IT in the next years… Everyone for sure is familiar with open-source software, but I bet none has ever heard of open-source hardware development: that’s where Arduino comes up!
The idea on which the Arduino project is based is to make electronic and software engineering available to everyone, by simplifying development to its basic in an open-source environment in which everyone is free to contribute.
In order to do so, Arduino is structured as an open source framework that allows users to quickly learn the basic notions of electronics and computer programming, through a set of easy and basic hardware controls and a facilitated programming language based on C++ and Java, called “Wiring”
This platform is sold at a starting price around 20 euros, but since it’s open-source and its hardware design information can be easily find online, everyone could potentially assembly one by himself, allowing this technology to be applied in almost every field, from computer gaming, to social networking, to even humanitarian projects.
Indeed, it’s pretty amazing to see what even kids and newbies were able to do with such a tool available to them! You can find some example at this TED Talk:
http://www.ted.com/talks/massimo_banzi_how_arduino_is_open_sourcing_imagination.html (only 15 mins, you might want to watch it all :p )
If you feel like you want to try it yourself, or you just want to get to know it a little more, here’s the official website http://www.arduino.cc/
I hope you’ll find it as interesting as I did!
Cheers,
Giovanni
LINUX: That’s how everything started… and goes on.
While geeking around the web during the last days I came across an old post that I’d like to share with you.
Since it was written in 1991 it won’t probably be one of the most up-to date news among techies, but however, I think it might be interesting, since it has indirectly affected a great part of the software environment of the last 20 years.
On August 25th 1991 Linus Torvalds, from the University of Helsinky published his first post on what will then be one of the most discussed OS of the 90s and 00s: Linux.
You can find the group discussion here: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/comp.os.minix/dlNtH7RRrGA
That’s a piece of history!
I’d expecially like to get your attention on the fact that what was supposed to be “just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu” has already had an enormous impact on many IT developments during the last decade.
For instance, Linux is nowadays running underneath almost every smartphone’s operating systems: as you probably already know, both Android and iOs for example are Linux-based, and I’m deeply convinced that this played a major role in their great success… and that post is how everything started!
Based on this, I like to wonder on how the whole Linux/Open-source culture changed the game’s rules in many companies’ business models, how it allowed to boost innovation through user’s participation in software development, and how it allowed to reduce costs for many software’s end-users.
For example, do you think Android devices could be so (relatively) cheap without a Linux-based system at their core?
We’ve seen Linux having an incredible success by “going mobile”, but if we try to get back to present-day, from that first post in the summer of 1991 to just a few days ago, we can read about another impressive development: the little penguin is going mobile again, but this time, with a car!
It might be a little early to say it, but I think it won’t be foolish to imagine cars driven by some sort of Linux app in the near future. And then… who knows?
Apart of the massive exploitation done on the smartphone’s market in the last years, and of the forthcoming development in the car industry, where do you think the next big breakthrough will happen? Will there be any more room for IT-based innovation leaded by the crowd-driven impulse of the Linux community?
I’d like to know more about your thoughts on this topic.
Cheers,
Giovanni
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