Adrien Treuille · Carnegie Mellon University
Next-generation Citizen Science

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Nanoscale engineering holds the key to developing next-generation therapies, but this painstaking process depends on the difficult task of predicting molecular self-assembly. This talk describes two unprecedented "citizen science" projects to rapidly advance bioengineering. Our on-line protein folding game, Foldit, challenges non-experts to fold proteins, a puzzle akin to "3D Tetris." Our brand new nano-engineering game, EteRNA, pushes this concept into the rich and confounding world of real experimentation and validation: every week, we synthesize top EteRNA player designs and return this data as score back into the game. EteRNA thus enabling thousands of enthusiasts to stringently test scientific hypotheses on a weekly basis. Both games now hosts a thriving communities of citizen scientists who are outperforming existing state-of-the-art algorithmic methods.

Adrien Treuille, an assistant professor of computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon University who specializes in real-time computer simulation techniques, is the recipient of an National Science Foundation CAREER award, the Okawa Prize, and has been recognized by Technology Review magazine as one of the world's top 35 innovators under the age of 35. He also pursues research in the simulation and animation of very high-dimensional nonlinear phenomena like animal morphology, human motion, and large fluid systems. While he seeks theoretical advances, he is also deeply interested in the implications for science and engineering of these techniques, from fluid dynamics to laying down a joint cognitive and biomechanical basis for animal motion.