Panelists: Brian Fuchs (DoC, Imperial College London), David Aanenson (Epidemiology, ICL), Laura Youngson (Lightyear Foundation)

Time: 10:30 to 11:30, Saturday 1 October

This panel will expore the potential of the mobile app for science, in the classroom, the museum and laboratory.

This panel will expore the potential of the mobile app for science, in the classroom, the llaboratory and the field.

In the past few years, mobile devices have started to gain acceptance in the classroom and laboratory. They have also become essential tools for data collection and analysis in the field in many areas of scientific research. And museums as well have begun to recognise the potential of mobiles for outreach and education in science.

The panel will bring together research scientists, developers, and educators to explore the growing possibilities for using mobile devices in scientific research and education. In particular, the panel will look at a recent success stories in the “apps for science” area (Epicollect).

A special feature of the panel will be the participation a group of Ghanean students who will discuss the results of a mobile data collection experiment via a videoconference link. The data collection experiment will be conducted using Epicollect and has been organised by the Lightyear Foundation.

Talks:

David Aanensen / Laura Youngson: Epicollect in Ghana. Live Mobile Data Collection.
Nick Short: VetAid Kenya
Muki Haklay: ‘Extreme’ Citizen Science

Brian Fuchs (ICL)is Co-ordinator of the Mobile Applications Centre in the Department of Computing at Imperial College. He has been active in the development of computing support for research in the US, UK, and Germany for many years. He currently acts as a developer and researcher in several projects with a strong mobile component (TfL Mobile Demonstrator, Vortix, Totalcare, MusicShare, SpamJam).

Dr. David Aanensen is a bio-informatician in the School of Public Health at Imperial College. Along with Derek Huntley, Jon Evans and Chris Powell, he is the author of Epicollect, a generic mobile data gathering tool originally designed to support mobile data gathering in epidemiology.

Laura Youngson is the co-founder of the Lightyear Foundation having worked in Ghana at the Ghana Planetarium. With an MSci in physics from Durham she doesn’t get to use her science much in her day job working for the UK government but loves working on science projects like this, especially in Africa. The Lightyear Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation that works primarily in Ghana taking their unique blend of interactive science experiments and projects to schools there. The September science camps are taking place in ten schools in Ghana where they hope to reach more than 800 children. Follow us at @lightyear_fdn and
www.lightyearfoundation.org

Muki Haklay is a Professor of Geographic Information Science and the director of UCL Extreme Citizen Science research group (ExCiteS). His research interests include Public Access and use of Environmental Information, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Usability Engineering of GIS, Participatory mapping and Citizen Science . He specialises in interdisciplinary research. Prof. Haklay’s ExCiteS group, funded through the EPSRC Challenging Engineering fellowship aims to provide a universal technology that will allow any community to carry out a Citizen Science project that will deal with the issues that concern them – from biodiversity to food production. You can read more at http://povesham.wordpress.com/2011/03/07/extreme-citizen-science-excites/.

Nick Short (RVC) is head of the Electronic Media Unit (EMU) at the Royal Veterinary College and founder, with Graeme Thirlwell and Eric Feron, of VETAID and VETAID Kenya (http://androidsinafrica.blogspot.com/), which use mobile technology to assist veterinary field work.