Press Release
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updated: Apr 6, 2017
Ithaca, NY, April 6, 2017 (Newswire.com)
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EyesOnALZ (http://eyesonalz.com) – a project to crowdsource Alzheimer’s research is launching an online competition to #CrushALZ on April 6th, in partnership with The Crowd & The Cloud – a public television documentary series about citizen science.
The documentary, created by a producer of Carl Sagan’s original COSMOS series, shines first light on a growing movement of citizens participating en masse in the advancement of scientific research. The creators of this 4-part mini-series are dedicated to “turning viewers into doers” by encouraging hands-on participation in science.
Normally it would take a year for Cornell to analyze these data, but with the momentum of the documentary, we hope to enlist the help of millions of viewers to answer a key research question that will help us leap forward toward a treatment.
Pietro Michelucci, Director, Human Computation Institute
Stall Catchers (http://stallcatchers.com), developed as part of the EyesOnALZ project, is the first citizen science game to tackle Alzheimer’s disease. EyesOnALZ and Stall Catchers are featured in Episode 1 of the The Crowd and The Cloud, which will premier on National Public Television across the US on April 6th, and is available to watch online at http://crowdandcloud.org.
EyesOnALZ founder Pietro Michelucci will kick-off the “#CrushALZ Team Competition” on Stall Catchers during the social media event immediately following the series premiere. This live after-show event will take place at 10PM ET April 6, on The Crowd and The Cloud Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/crowdandcloudTV/).
Dr. Michelucci will join the live video stream with other subjects of the series, including EyesOnALZ biomedical collaborator Chris Schaffer from Cornell University. The month-long team competition aims to accelerate Cornell’s groundbreaking Alzheimer’s research program, which, according to Dr. Schaffer, “would be impractical without Stall Catchers”.
Any interested organization will be able to create a team on Stall Catchers and compete with other organizations who want to help eliminate Alzheimer’s. The team registration will open up at 6AM ET, April 6 at StallCatchers.com. Instructions on how to set up teams and invite members will be posted on the EyesOnALZ blog (http://blog.eyesonalz.com) that morning.
The most active teams in the competition will receive daily exposure via EyesOnALZ media channels and those of partner organizations. A number of PBS stations, also set to participate in the competition, will invite their local viewers to join forces and #CrushALZ.
According to Dr. Michelucci, a new Alzheimer’s dataset has been loaded into Stall Catchers just for the competition: “Normally it would take a year for Cornell to analyze these data, but with the momentum of the documentary, we hope to enlist the help of millions of viewers to answer a key research question that will help us leap forward toward a treatment.”
Players’ collective progress toward answering the research question will be reported throughout the competition. Dr. Michelucci plans to reveal the potential impact of this research question during the after-show event. “If all goes well, in one month we will have our answer and move on to the next question.”
Source: Human Computation Institute
