What I really liked about visiting ISMB last year was their diversity of talks and subgroup meetings in all areas related to biology and computers. Last year I joined two talks about improving bioinformatics education which were really interesting because I hadn’t thought about that before. This year I joined a special session on citizen science.
Citizen science is public participation in scientific research and can be done by almost everyone. I had heard about Foldit or Rosetta@Home but (unfortunately) never participated. Those two projects deal with protein folding (how does a protein reach its final functional 3D structure?) which is an important scientific problem but is computationally very expensive to study. While one of the projects is a screensaver which uses free resources of personal computers, the other is a game where players can get highscores for folding protein fragments manually. Helping science in a playful way is cool by itself but the project that was presented in one of the talks brought this to the next level. A citizen science minigame was integrated into an action game for PCs and consoles.
