The School of Computer Science at the University of Windsor is pleased to present…  

Colloquium Presentation by Dr. Jérôme Waldispühl 

 Date: Friday, November 18, 2022 

Time: 11:00 am – 12:00 pm

Location: Erie Hall, Room 3123

Reminders: Two-part attendance is mandatory, arrive 5-10 minutes prior to the event starting – LATECOMERS WILL NOT BE ADMITTED once the door has been closed and the presentation has begun. Please be respectful of the presenter by NOT knocking on the door for admittance.

 Abstract: 

Over the past decade, online science discovery games (SDGs) have become an increasingly popular practice for engaging the public in research activities. This methodology has had the most impact in molecular and cell biology, where participants are recruited for not only data collection and classification tasks, but also for solving complex computational problems that require human supervision or insight. As the life sciences move toward increasingly large and ambitious projects, however, there is a need to complement existing models that try to attract users to yet another third-party website. Here we describe our experience with Borderlands, a massively multiplayer online game that embeds citizen-science problems into its virtual universe and engages a new user base, with implications for future citizen-science initiatives seeking to meet the growing demands of biology.

Keywords: Citizen Science, Crowdsourcing, Microbiome, Computational Biology

Biography: 

Jérôme Waldispühl is an associate professor of Computer Science at McGill University, where he conducts research in computation molecular biology. In the last 10 years, he pioneered the use of video games to engage the public in genomic data analysis with Phylo (2010), Colony B (2016), Borderlands Science (2020) and Project Discovery Phase 3 (2020), which have gathered millions of citizen scientists worldwide. He has been invited to present these contributions at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (2013), the Québec Parliament (2016) and the French Academy of Science (2018).

Jérôme Waldispühl holds a PhD in Computer Science (2004) from École Polytechnique (France). Before joining McGill in 2009, Prof. Waldispühl was an instructor in Applied Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2006-2009) and did a postdoc in the Biology department at Boston College (2005-2006). He is a recipient of the Tomlinson Scientist Award (2012) and the Fessenden Professorship in Science Innovation (2013).