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Active Distributed Computing Projects - Distributed Human Projects

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Project Information Project % Complete Major Supported Platforms
 
Distributed Human Projects
Distributed Proofreaders Help proofread electronic texts for Project Gutenberg (PG) at Distributed Proofreaders (DP).

On February 19, 2003, DP posted its 1,000th project to PG. In August, 2003, the project set a record of 129,273 pages proofread in one month. On September 3, 2003, DP posted its 2,000th project. On October 15, 2003, PG published its 10,000th ebook, a goal which was set in 1971. On January 14, 2004, DP posted its 3,000th project. On April 8, 2004, DP posted its 4,000th book. On August 21, 2004, DP posted its 5,000th project. On October 8, 2004, DP posted its 5,000th unique title. On February 2, 2005, DP posted its 6,000th unique title. On June 27, 2005, DP posted its 7,000th unique title. On February 8, 2006, DP posted its 8,000th unique title. On September 11, 2006, DP posted its 9,000th unique title. On March 9, 2007, DP posted its 10,000th unique title. On September 12, 2007, DP posted its 11,000th unique title. In September, 2008, DP posted its 14,000th unique title. In October, 2009, DP posted its 16,000th unique title.

To participate, create an account, then select a proofreading project from a list. A proofreading interface is displayed in your web browser, and you can proofread pages for the project one at a time. The project has personal stats pages and rankings for proofreaders so that each proofreader can see how he or she is doing compared to other proofreaders. You can also become a project manager and prepare proofreading projects for the site, and you can reassemble proof-read projects for submission to Project Gutenberg.

Join a discussion forum about this project.

Audio versions of some of the books in Project Gutenberg are being created in the Gutenberg Audio Books project.

Read a November 15, 2005, interview of Michael Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg, by Dr. Samuel Vaknin.

ongoing:
16,117 books completed
N/A
Distributed Proofreaders Europe Help proofread electronic texts at Distributed Proofreaders Europe. This project "is a service of Project Gutenberg Europe, Project Rastko, and the Global Translation Project. It has the ability [to proofread] books in any Unicode-supported language."

The project submitted its first book to Project Gutenberg on February 9, 2004. It submitted its 100th book to Project Gutenberg on March 31, 2005.

To participate, create an account, then select a proofreading project from a list. A proofreading interface is displayed in your web browser, and you can proofread pages for the project one at a time. The project has personal stats pages and rankings for proofreaders so that each proofreader can see how he or she is doing compared to other proofreaders. You can also become a project manager and prepare proofreading projects for the site, and you can reassemble proof-read projects for submission to Project Gutenberg.

Join a discussion forum about this project.

ongoing:
656 books completed
N/A
NEW!
Distributed Proofreaders Canada Help proofread electronic texts for Project Gutenberg Canada (PGC) at Distributed Proofreaders Canada (DPC). This projct focuses on books published in Canada, but may also include books from other countries.

To participate, create an account, then select a proofreading project from a list. A proofreading interface is displayed in your web browser, and you can proofread pages for the project one at a time. The project has personal stats pages and rankings for proofreaders so that each proofreader can see how he or she is doing compared to other proofreaders. You can also become a project manager and prepare proofreading projects for the site, and you can reassemble proof-read projects for submission to Project Gutenberg Canada.

Join a discussion forum about this project.

ongoing:
232 books completed
N/A
20Q.net Twenty Questions, "the neural net on the Internet," is an experimental artificial intelligence system which asks you to think of an object and then tries to quess what the object is by asking you twenty (more or less) questions. It learns from the answers you give to its questions. The more people play this game with it, the more it learns. The project website is also available in Spanish, French, German, and other languages. ongoing N/A
Help teach indoor mobile robots to be smarter in the Open Mind Indoor Common Sense project. This project will create a repository of knowledge which will enable people to create more intelligent mobile robots for use in home and office enviornments.

Starting on November 9, 2006, the project is offering participants a US$25 Amazon.com gift certificate if they submit 1000 accepted entries. Only entries submitted after November 9, 2006 will count. Each participant can earn a lifetime maximum of 20 gift certificates. A maximum of 900 gift certificates will be awarded. 777 gift certificates have been awarded as of June 18, 2008. The project has temporarily stopped awarding gift certificates as of January, 2009.

This project is part of the OpenMind Initiative to develop "intelligent" software.

ongoing: 1,588 registered users have submitted 406,945 items. N/A

Help The ESP Game label images on the Internet. The project presents a Java applet game to volunteers. A pair of volunteers is shown a series of images and must type the same one-word description of an image within a time limit. The more images the pair tags, and the faster they type the same description, the more points they score. Each volunteer's points accumulate. The project associates a set of one-word descriptions for each of the images it indexes. The images can be searched through the project site.

To participate in the project, sign up for a user account, then click on the Play Now button. Your browser should load a Java applet in a new window and provide further instructions for playing the game.

ongoing:
images labeled
N/A

Help develop common sense artificial intelligence at questsin. The project is attempting to "cluster information into sets, made up of related elements (words to start with, followed by concepts, ideas etc) and their potential hierarchies." You can help build the information sets by entering lists of related terms into the interface on the project's main web page. Data collected by the project will eventually be made available to the public in raw form, similar to other projects. For now the project gives immediate results and can be used as a research tool on its own.

Learn more about the algorithms behind the project in the project owner's blog.

Join a discussion forum about the project.

ongoing N/A

Get paid to "complete simple tasks that people do better than computers" in Amazon Mechanical Turk. Participants can choose from many available HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) to work on, accept a HIT and submit results through the project website, and be paid when their results are approved by the person or group listing the HIT. The money you earn is deposited in your Amazon.com account, and you can transfer it from there into your personal checking account or to your Amazon.com gift certificate balance. You must be 18 or older to participate in the project.
ongoing paid project

N/A

Stardust@Home
Help Stardust@Home find grains of interstellar dust in an aerogel particle collector which was returned from NASA's Stardust space probe to Earth on January 15, 2006. Participants (who first go through web-based training and pass a qualification test) can access a "virtual microscope" through a web page and then look for interstellar dust grains in "focus movies" (stacks of microscopic images created from the Stardust Interstellar Dust Collector).

From the project website: "Finding the incredibly tiny interstellar dust impacts in the Stardust Interstellar Dust Collector (SIDC) will be extremely difficult. Because dust detectors on the Ulysses and Galileo spacecraft have detected interstellar dust streaming into the solar system, we know there should be about 45 interstellar dust impacts in the SIDC. These impacts can only be found using a high-magnification microscope with a field of view smaller than a grain of salt. But the aerogel collector that we have to search enormous by comparison, about a tenth of a square meter (about a square foot) in size. The job is roughly equivalent to searching for 45 ants in an entire football field, one 5cm by 5cm (2 inch by 2 inch) square at a time! More than 1.6 million individual fields of view will have to be searched to find the interstellar dust grains. We estimate that it would take more than twenty years of continuous scanning for us to search the entire collector by ourselves."

As of September 6, 2006 the project has identified several possible interstellar dust tracks. Now the project owners have to figure out the best way to remove the tracks from the aerogel so the tracks can be examined more closely. On Septmeber 18, 2006, the CAPTEM Stardust Oversight Committee met to decide how best to investigate the potential interstellar dust tracks. On September 26, they decided to learn what they can from viewing the tiles from different sides, while experimenting with ways to remove the tracks using the "flight spare" tile. As of October 6, 2006, over 20 million searches have been completed by project participants, and more than 1/4 of of the aerogel collector has been scanned. As of December 1, 2006, "about 600 high-resolution focus movies of candidate extraterrestrial tracks" have been created. The movies will be analyzed at Berkeley. As of June 8, 2007, the project is practicing extracting insterstellar dust tracks preparing to extract actual insterstellar dust tracks. Phase 1 of the project completed successfully at the end of July, 2007. In the 11 months that phase lasted, participants analyzed over one third of the tiles and identified several dozen candidate tracks. Phase 2 began on August 10, 2007. This phase doubles the resolution of the focus movies to find even smaller candidate dust tracks.

On February 13, 2008, the first track, I1017,2, was physcially extracted from the Stardust interstellar dust collector. The particle at the end of the track is 200 microns below the surface. More information about the extraction is available in the project's blog. Non-desctructive synchrotron x-ray fluorescence analysis of the first track was completed during the last week of February, 2008. The particle contains large amounts of iron and nickel, two elements common in extraterrestrial materials. A status update for the results of the first 6 tracks was given on July 31, 2008. None of the tracks appear to be Interstellar.

On January 14, 2009, the project posted an Interstellar Preliminary Examination - Update, a 10-minute narrated slide show about the ISPE and the first of a series of updates. See all of the updates.

On October 15, 2009, the project published its first "Duster" paper, "Non-destructive search for interstellar dust using synchrotron microprobes." This peer-reviewed journal article includes some project participants (i.e. Dusters) among its authors.

See an image that shows which aerogel tiles have been scanned and which are in progress.

See the Alpha List (login required) of the best candidate particle tracks discovered so far.

See a live webcam view of the Stardust Cleanroom at the Johnson Space Center. See images of comet particles retrieved from Stardust. The images were released on February 20, 2006. See a Stardust status update published on February 21, 2006.

Join a discussion forum about the project.

ongoing N/A
Herbaria@home
Help Herbaria@home document and make public the information from thousands of herbarium sheets from university and museum collections. Herbarium sheets (dried, pressed plant collections) can be a valuable resource for botanical, ecological and historic research. Among many potential uses, data from the project could help with climate-change research, conservation, taxonomy and studies of biodiversity. Even just knowing that a particular specimen exists can be extremely useful for a botanist or historian.

The botanical records created by the project are immediately made public on the project website and will also be given to national and international biodiversity databases. The project is supported by the Botanical Collections Managers Group, with specimens for the pilot project coming from Manchester Museum's herbarium. Once the project is well-established, it will be expand to include other collections.

You can participate in the project by viewing images of herbarium sheets through the project website and by transcribing the details from each sheet label (for example the species name, collector, date of collection, site, etc.). You don't need any particular botanical experience in order to help. To participate, sign up for a user account at the project website, then click the Allocate Specimens link (or select a page from the "Sheets to document" section.

Join a discussion forum about the project (registration is required).

ongoing;
specimens processed
N/A
systemic
Help systemic search for and describe extrasolar planetary systems using professional astronomical images and data on the Internet. You do not need to have any prior experience or expertise with Astronomy to participate: you can learn everything you need to know through the project website. systemic is not an organized project: it provides tools to amateurs to conduct searches on their own. Amateurs who make discoveries need to publish their discoveries on their own. systemic's main page is a weblog about the latest discoveries in the fields of extrasolar planet discovery and solar system exploration. See more information about the project.

To participate in the project, look for a collection of links on the right side of the main page, under the headers "Pages:" and "Links." These links explain how to participate in the "discovery and characterization of extrasolar planets." You can download a Java-based software package to work with extrasolar planet data and you can use the Systemic Backend collaborative environment to work with other amateur searchers.

ongoing N/A
Galaxy Zoo
Help Galaxy Zoo classify over one million newly-discovered galaxies. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is completing a detailed optical survey of over 1/4 of the sky and is generating a 3-dimensional map of over one million galaxies and quasars. Most of these galaxies have not been classified. Computers are not able to classify them easily, but humans are good at classifying them visually. See more information about the project. See the latest discoveries and project news in the project blog and twitter feed. The project is available in Polish as of July 29, 2009, and will soon be available in other languages.

On February 18, 2009, the project began Galaxy Zoo 2, which asks participants to provide more detailed classification data for the project's 250,000 "brightest and most interesting galaxies." The project reached its initial goal of 40 million classification by October 9, 2009. It reached 50 million clasisfications by December 2, 2009. It hopes to reach 60 million classifications.

On May 30, 2008, the project was approved for 7 orbits of observation time from the Hubble Space Telecope (HST) sometime after the telescope is serviced in October, 2008. Galaxy Zoo will observe the Voorwerp object, which was first discovered by a Galaxy Zoo participant.

On April 1, 2009, at about 7 PM EST (midnight UTC, April 2), the project began a challenge to classify 1 million galaxies in 100 hours, to celebrate 100 Hours of Astronomy. Project participants classified 1.5 million galaxies by the end of the challenge. Also, on April 3, 2009, the project classified its 20 millionth galaxy.

On June 18, 2009, the project submitted its 11th paper, "Galaxy Zoo: Exploring the Motivations of Citizen Science Volunteers", to Astronomy Education Review. On August 5, 2009, the project submitted a new paper, "Reproducing Galaxy Morphologies Via Machine Learning." The paper demonstrates that by using the visual classifications generated by Galaxy Zoo to train an artificial neural network to identify galaxies, the network can identify new galaxies with greater than 90% accuracy. Computers will help humans keep up with the quickly increasing amounts of new data generated in the future.

To participate in the project, complete a tutorial to learn how to classify galaxies, then view images via the project website and classify them.

Join a discussion forum about the project.

ongoing N/A
Project Budburst
Help Project Budburst track the dates on which native tree and plant species leaf or flower across the U.S. Data gathered from the project will help scientists track climate changes which might be caused by global warming. Results from the project will be available at the end of the blooming season, in about July, 2008.

To participate in the project, follow the instructions on the Participate page.

ongoing N/A
Play the Foldit game to fold proteins into three-dimensional shapes and to help scientists to better predict how proteins fold into those shapes. Eventually participants will be able to design all-new proteins. Learn more about the science behind the game.

The game "takes players through a series of practice levels designed to teach the basics of protein folding, before turning them loose on real proteins from nature. 'Our main goal was to make sure that anyone could do it, even if they didn't know what biochemistry or protein folding was.' At the moment, the game only uses proteins whose three-dimensional structures have been solved by researchers. But ...'soon we'll be introducing puzzles for which we don't know the solution.'"

This project is participating in the CASP8 protein structure prediction contest, which occurs between May 5, 2008 and August 1, 2008. Results from the contest will be released at the CASP meeting on December 3-7, 2008. To prepare for the contest, the project has released some CASP warmup puzzles (Fibronectin, E. coli, Human Fyn 2, Transduction).

To participate in the project, register for an account at the game's website, then download the Windows client and start playing. A Linux client may be available soon.

ongoing Windows 32
Help Looking for Mars Polar Lander find the Mars Polar Lander, which crashed in 1999, by studying high-resolution images of the surface of Mars from the area scientists predicted the lander crashed in. If the lander is found, studying the condition of the lander may help determine the cause of its crash.

To participate in the project, follow links to the project's web pages of images, view the images, and add a comment to the project's blog if you find anything interesting in the images.

ongoing N/A
They Work for You
Help They Work for You match video of the British House of Commons from the BBC with text of the speech archived by Hansard. Matching text to video makes the videos searchable and allows British citizens to see how their PMs are voting on legislative bills. Project participants use a Flash application to match written speech with spoken speech in the video, creating timestamps for all of the pieces of the speech. The project stores these timestamps and makes them available to users of the website.

To participate in the project, click the "Give me a random speech that needs timestamping" link on the project website. On the next web page view the video and click the "Now" button when you hear the piece of text that is displayed below the video. Participants can register if they want to be included in the websites statistics rankings, but they can also participate without registering.

ongoing;
22,126 speeches timestamped
N/A
reCAPTCHA
Help reCAPTCHA match non-machine-readable words from the Internet Archive's project to scan public domain books and make electronic versions of them available on the Internet. reCAPTCHA is technically a website security tool rather than a distributed human project, but the Internet Archive benefits when website users authenticate themselves using the tool. A reCAPTCHA shows an image of two words bisected by a line. One of the words is a control word and the other is a word from the Internet Archive project which needs to be interpreted. Computers could possibly scan and interpret all of the control words, but since each Internet Archive word is new, computers can't memorize the interpreted text. The interpreted words are reassembled into finished texts by the Internet Archives.

From an August, 2008, news article: "In the first full year of reCAPTCHA's operations, 1.2 billion reCAPTCHA puzzles have been solved and more than 440 million words deciphered. This is the equivalent of manually transcribing more than 17,600 books. Four million words are now being transcribed per day."

"It would take more than 1,500 people working 40 hours a week at a rate of 60 words a minute to match the weekly output of the CAPTCHA project. Amazingly, the reCAPTCHA team has managed to leverage unused human "cycles" for the common good."

To participate in the project, incorporate the reCAPTCHA web service into your website or use this reCAPTCHA. You can also use a reCAPTCHA on the project's Learn More web page.

ongoing N/A
Project Squirrel
Help Project Squirrel better understand the ecology of squirrels in the United States. "By contributing your observations of squirrels from home, the office, school, a park, or anywhere, you are helping us better understand the ecology of our neighborhoods. Contribute data as often as you like, from anywhere you are."

To participate in the project, follow the instructions on the Participate page.

ongoing N/A
NEW!
Galaxy Zoo Supernovae
Help Galaxy Zoo Supernovae catch exploding stars--supernovae. Data for the project are provided by the Palomar Transient Factory automated sky survey at the Palomar Observatory. Two astronomers in the Canary Islands observed the best candidates found by the project in its first run. The astronomers viewed 16 candidates from the project on June 12, 2009: most of the candidates were confirmed to be supernovae. See more information about the project. See the latest discoveries and project news in the Galaxy Zoo blog and twitter feed.

To participate in the project, study the How to Take Part page at the project website, then view images via the project website and classify them.

Join the Galaxy Zoo discussion forum.

ongoing N/A
NEW!
Help Galaxy Zoo Mergers "understand the cosmic collisions that lead to galaxy mergers." Participants will help model a different galaxy each day by viewing a simulation of a merger and comparing it with real astronomical images to determine the best merger simulation.

To participate in the project, study the How to Take Part page at the project website, then view images and simulations via the project website and classify the simulations.

Join the Galaxy Zoo discussion forum.

ongoing N/A
NEW!
Help the NASA Be A Martian project create more detailed maps of Mars, and count and classify craters on Mars, from high-resolution images returned from Mars orbiters. Watch some videos to learn about why the project is mapping Mars and how to help.

To participate in the project, click one of the links on the Start Mapping page to Map Mars or Count Craters, then follow the instructions on the next page. You can create a free account on the site if you'd like to track your contributions: you may also participate anonymously.

ongoing N/A

The following icons may appear in the Supported Platforms section of the table:
dialup-friendlythis project is good for users with dialup Internet access
paid projectthis is a for-pay project
Windows 32this project runs on the Windows 32-bit platform
Linuxthis project runs on the Linux platform
MacOSthis project runs on the Mac OS platform
Solaristhis project runs on the Solaris platform

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