This page is a list of all the hacks demoed at Science Hack Day Boston 2013.
On Sunday, October 20th, please add your hack by 13:37 ahead of the 2pm presentations.
Projects brainstormed before and during the event are at bos2013ideas.
Example title
Brief description. Feel free to explain a little about the motivation, what you envisioned when you started, what you actually did. Anything interesting or unexpected that came up in the process?
Hackers: Hacker name, Other hacker name, etc
Materials: data, tools, APIs used:
What you started with: what parts you made here at SHD, and what you came with
Images or video: you could also deposit in "Science Hack Day Boston" flickr set or tag with #SHDBos
Source code: if applicable
Website: url here
Building an addictive app-based engine for Diet-Microbiome correlations
The Alm lab at MIT in conjunction with http://openbiome.com/ have been building the capacity for large scale and open intestinal microbiome research with immediate diagnostic and thereputic applications for clinicians and their patients. In addition to collecting data on microbiota based on patient samples, OpenBiome would like to build capacity to collect and correlate data points around dietary habits.
Hackathon Goal: Explore the creation of a quantified self-style app for collecting dietary data that can then be correlated with microbiome data collected/housed by http://openbiome.com/.
Hackers:
- Mariana mgmatus@mit.edu
- Lyre Calliope lyre.calliope@gmail.com http://twitter.com/captaincalliope
- Albert Wang aywang31@gmail.com
- Kevin Ma kevinchenma@college.harvard.edu
- John Byrnes john@johnbyrnes.info
- Fahim Naeem fahimnaeem91@gmail.com
Google Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14Q4ZNZxOb3-ncJZkEZ4-nsxNX4ssIuxbaA2dqSAkAPE/edit
Biology to English dictionary
Our speech and writing is filled not only with jargon (which makes no sense to a non-technical reader) but also quasi-jargon, which appears understandable, but actually has a different meaning to biologists and non-biologists. We made a list of covert jargon terms and their decontextualized meanings, and used it to create a translation tool that takes scientific writing and outputs how it might sound to a general reader. "It's mad libs you don't know you're playing" - Willow
Hackers: Kyle Karhohs, Christina Nicholson, Dan Polka, Melissa Lewis, Jessica Polka
Materials: data, tools, APIs used:
What you started with: We developed the idea at SHD and brought in a large fraction of the terms from an existing crowdsourced list
Images or video: http://www.flickr.com/photos/105264519@N08/10409951723/
Source code: Matlab code here
Website: Contribute here! http://goo.gl/IYcoeV
Wikipedia Women in STEM
Motivation
Wikipedia has a well-known and oft-discussed gender gap in both its editors and in its articles. The lack of representation of women in the sciences is particularly stark and has spawned numerous articles and events, and even a WikiProject striving to increase engagement by women editors on this topic.
I would like to help with these projects, but I am an infrequent Wikipedia editor with only small chunks of time to contribute. How can I make it as easy as possible for someone like me to increases the representation by STEM women on Wikipedia?
Wikipedia Women in STEM is a proof of concept project that programmatically identifies Wikipedia articles on women in STEM that lack important basic features, making it easy for casual contributors to take on bite-sized projects.
Deliverable
Please visit Wikipedia Women in STEM for the proof of concept site.
Wikipedia Women in STEM programmatically identifies Wikipedia articles on women in STEM that lack important components like an infobox, categories, an image, and citations, or don't exist at all, making it easy for casual contributors to take on bite-sized projects.
For articles lacking images, the entry links to Google image search results, restricted to images with a Wikipedia-compatible license for easy browsing.
Lists of women were sourced manually from Wikipedia and other sites (many Wikipedia lists of women in the sciences contain women without entries!) and curated in Python. Wikipedia data was programmatically gathered and triaged using the Python wiki-api library. The resulting contribution opportunities were generated as Markdown and converted to HTML using a Python Markdown library.
The source code will be available on GitHub under the MIT license once I clean it up. :)
Further Work
Nothing about the underlying implementation is specific to women, and I'd like to apply this technique to other groups of under-represented STEM leaders, including African American and non-Western (in particularly, African and Asian) scientists.
Tracking progress is an important part of this type of initiative, so the first extension to this project would be storing and visualizing progress on the Wikipedia entries over time (as well as flagging regressions -- articles frequently get deleted or tagged as having issues).
Another natural extension of this project is to present editing opportunities across the suite of languages supported by Wikipedia. Most Wikipedia editors edit primarily English articles, and a common way that non-English articles get written is by translating the English version. Thus, it is important to make it easy for translators and native speakers of other languages to participate in this project and share resources across the different language entries for a subject.
With a full-fledge website in place, gamifying contributions through a points or badge system could be a fun way to incentivize contributors. Imagine a Wikipedia edit-a-thon / competition at the next Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, on in Womens' Studies classes across the globe!
Hacker: Jessica McKellar
Materials: Wikipedia, wiki-api, Python Markdown
What you started with: nada
Source code: coming soon!
Website: Wikipedia Women in STEM
Evolutionary Music
We envisioned an electronic music box whose melody evolves according to Conway's Game of Life. We implemented a Java-based MIDI playback system. Inspired by the AudioTools "Tone Matrix," we used the vertical axis to describe the tone and the horizontal axis to describe the time within a measure. The system evolves at the end of each measure.
Hackers: David Bruce Borenstein, Melanie Mueller
Materials: Java, MIDI, Conway's Game of Life
Source code: https://github.com/biologicaldynamics/evolutionary-music/
Phonograph Scanner (was Laser Phonograph)
Many archives, both local and around the world have old phonographs, often of historical value. Either by damage or just becoming so fragile with time that the needle would destroy them, these pieces of our history are playable. At least with conventional means; the data is still on the disks. Inspired by projects like Irene, but with a vastly smaller budget, we set out to come up with a way to read the lines on 78s with an office scanner and some intelligent processing. By the end of the weekend, we had in our possession several archival 78s, figured out how to obtain high-contrast scans, wrote preliminary algorithms for identifying features, disk centers, and so forth, and even gotten out a small bit of audio.
Inspired by this success, we are continuing the project, working with several Harvard archives to digitize old records.
Hackers: Michael Baym, Bence Béky, Edward Klacza, Kevin Mehall, Avi Robinson-Mosher, James Truslow, John Byrnes
Materials: Epson V200 photo (borrowed), Matlab, Python, records
Materials: We showed up with a scanner, some records, and laptops.
Images or video:
Source code: <coming soon>
Website: <coming soon>
Open Source Collaboration Software: File Previews
Expanding on the Center for Open Science's F/OSS for scientific collaboration. Our priority is to be robust to many kinds of research across many domains, so we have to accept a wide array of file types, from images to scripts. Every obstacle to a understanding a resource is an obstacle to transparency, and toward that end, this group worked on finding open source means of previewing these disparate file types!
Hackers: Melissa Lewis, Nezar Abdennur, Shivin Misra
Materials: Pandas and SlickGrid for tabular data rendering, Pygments for syntax highlighting in code previews, and IPython Notebook rendering/exporting.
What you started with: We came with rendering for images and some code.
Website: https://github.com/CenterForOpenScience/modular-file-renderer
Impact Factor/scientific trends (Placeholder)
Brief description. Feel free to explain a little about the motivation, what you envisioned when you started, what you actually did. Anything interesting or unexpected that came up in the process?
Hackers: Hacker name, Other hacker name, etc
Materials: data, tools, APIs used:
What you started with: what parts you made here at SHD, and what you came with
Images or video: you could also deposit in "Science Hack Day Boston" flickr set or tag with #SHDBos
Source code: if applicable
Website: url here
Transcranial stimulation (Placeholder)
Brief description. Feel free to explain a little about the motivation, what you envisioned when you started, what you actually did. Anything interesting or unexpected that came up in the process?
Hackers: Hacker name, Other hacker name, etc
Materials: data, tools, APIs used:
What you started with: what parts you made here at SHD, and what you came with
Images or video: you could also deposit in "Science Hack Day Boston" flickr set or tag with #SHDBos
Source code: if applicable
Website: url here
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