| Active Distributed Computing Projects - Distributed Human Projects |
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These links take you to other project categories on this site:
Mathematics Art Puzzles/Games Miscellaneous Distributed Human Projects Collaborative Knowledge Bases Charity See the bottom of this page for a description of the icons on the page. |
| Project Information | Project % Complete | Major Supported Platforms | |
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| Distributed Human Projects | |||
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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. 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 Radio Gutenberg project. Read a November 15, 2005, interview of Michael Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg, by Dr. Samuel Vaknin. |
ongoing: 11,569 books completed |
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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: 497 books completed |
N/A | |
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.
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ongoing | N/A | |
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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 475 gift certificates will be awarded. 443 gift certificates have been awarded as of March 6, 2008. This project is part of the OpenMind Initiative to develop "intelligent" software. |
ongoing: 1,588 registered users have submitted 406,945 items. | N/A | |
BeWeS MouseTracker tracks the
distance traveled by your computer mouse, and the number of times you click
it, and periodically reports that information to the project server. You can
compete against other project members and teams, and you can win a prize if
you are the first person to reach a distance goal. The project is just for
fun. The project's current distance goal is around the world.
The client is currently available only for Windows. The latest version of the client is available as of October 30, 2003. Join a discussion forum about the project. |
ongoing: Km. ( miles) total distance |
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Version 0.23 beta of the client is available for Windows. Version 0.4.1 of the client is available for Linux and Solaris. Version 0.4.0 is available for FreeBSD. Join a discussion forum about the project (via a link on the project website). |
ongoing: 8268y 13d 18h 21m 24s total uptime by 26,801 users |
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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: 35,737,740 images labeled |
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![]() 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 | |
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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 |
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![]() 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. 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 | |
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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 |
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![]() 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 | |
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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. To participate in the project, complete a tutorial to learn how to classify galaxies, then view images via the project website and classify them. A discussion forum about the project will be available soon. |
ongoing | N/A | |
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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 | |
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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. |
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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 | |
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