Open Science - SFD 2011

For the third year I was invited to give a talk at Software Freedom Day @ Alexandria University 2011 and I wanted to talk about something that links what I am doing now (I am a research assistant at E-JUST) and open source so I started researching Open Source Science.

Starting from the fact that I use a lot of open source modules and packages in my work developed by others and put on the internet for everyone to use. I began to understand the wider concept of open science which aims at enabling everyone who is willing to participate in any scientific endeavor to have a part in it.

Facilitated by the internet, ideas, tasks, documents, code, scientific data and even videos of experiments are shared by the project's coordinator for anyone to participate in anyway and every way possible. And the results are amazing !!

My main goal from the presentation and this post is to show how openness can boost research either by using the collective intelligence of all participants (as in the PolyMath project or InnoCentive) or reducing the time or the resources need as in science for citizens organization.

Other aspects of open science include making all the products of scientific projects available to the public for everyone to learn from and build on, saving money and time for other projects.

One of the best introduction you can have to open science is the presentation made by Michael Nielsen at TEDxWaterloo.



Also below is the presentation I gave at Software Freedom Day @ Alexandria University 2011.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sharing the Network: From Circuit Switching to Packet Switching (The Hitchhiker's Guide to Computer Networks)

Prelude ... From Circuit Switching to Packet Switching The simplest approach for two people to communicate over long distances is to connect them through a dedicate physical wire. However, how would we scale that model to a million people that individually want to be able to communicate with everyone else? One approach is to extend wires between all pairs of users, requiring hundreds of billions of wires.  This is definitely not a good way to design a network. So what's wrong with that design? First, it is unlikely that every single person in that network will want to talk to everyone else at the same time. This means that we can use fewer wires. Second, not all connections are created equal. Longer wires cost a lot more money than short ones. Our design should have short wires whenever possible. Also it will be nice if the cost of extending long wires is shared between multiple users at the same time. Let's revisit our connection strategy. Rather than extending wires betwe...
Read more

Attaching a WiFi Dongle to an AR Drone 2.0 (a.k.a. Compiling Drivers for ARM Based Devices)

Correction (4/24/2014): for your driver to work the AR Drone 2.0 you have to compile the kernel version provided by Parrot which can be found here https://devzone.parrot.com/projects/show/oss-ardrone2 One of the down sides of "out of the box" AR Drone 2.0 is that you can't control multiple drones from the same machine. Another down side is that you can't attach USB devices except flash memories and some other predefined devices due to the limited nature of the busybox deployed on the drone. To over come the first down side without manipulating the WiFi configurations of the built-in WiFi card (i.e. you don't want to mess up your new drone), you will need to overcome the second problem (i.e. install a WiFi dongle and its driver manually). In this tutorial, I try to walk you through the steps to do just that. I assume that you are working a Linux machine (seriously we are not going to compile drivers on Windows). Ubuntu is preferable ! Because the Drone has a...
Read more

Video on Demand: Part 1 (The Hitchhiker's Guide to Computer Networks)

Image
Data from the 2019 Global Internet Phenomena Report Video is the dominant type of traffic on the Internet. In 2019, video on demand constituted 60% of the total global Internet traffic. The image to the right shows the huge gap between the bandwidth demand of video streaming and the second highest application which is web traffic (think email, blogs, and news). This means that if you are in the computer networks business, you are pretty much in the business of video delivery. So the biggest question here, what is the best way to deliver video?  The "best" in this context can mean a couple of different things. It can mean delivering the best quality video for the user. Video quality does not only refer to whether a video is in HD or UHD but also whether it freezes and hangs or not. The "best" way to deliver video can also mean the most cost efficient way. If we can save 1% of the cost of delivering all videos on the Internet, we can save tens of millions of dollars i...
Read more