Introduction & Overview
- Check out the new IoT offerings from Amazon?
- Or perhaps from Google?
- Have a look at the rubric and team assignments (please check in on our main Gitter chat for links and further instructions).
Background information
What can Xlab do for you?
The Xlab is used to conduct research with human participants. We welcome UC Berkeley researchers of all persuasions to use our facilities and services.
- We can support in-lab studies with up to 36 computers, online studies, and can provide laptops for research outside the lab
- We have over 1000 people in our pool and it is expanding all the time
- We offer small research grants
- We can help manage and pay your participants
- We can provide consultation and guidance on IRB protocols
- We have several popular software packages available for researchers
Irrational Labs
How do we take academic insights on human behavior and bring it into the product development world? She’ll review what behavioral economics is, walk through specific examples from her work with companies and go over their step by step process Irrational Labs uses to tackle big problems.
Irrational labs is a non profit that uses behavioral economics to design interventions that make people happier, healthier and wealthier. Kristen also started Social Observatory in SF, a group that does field experiments around social design and connection – ask her about it at the end.
Reading / Tech
Tentative plan
The main event
20 minute presentation about Xlab, lab facilities, how to access them, IRB clearance, and campus resources for experimental social science.
20 minute presentation about Irrational Labs.
Followed by discussion, and (time allowing) discussion of mobile or web approaches to similar research questions.
Project check-ins
We’ll have another check-in from EDAM, including some comments by their mentor, Jorrit Poelen.
THe idea is to develop methods to openly compare ecological data richness/completeness of Ecostations to promote open data sharing.
There are lots of organisms out there but we do not know how they interact with one another.. One does a Sea otter eat?? It is hard to know with the current tools
The challenges of this project is : how do you integrate all the data that is scattered and organize them in a way that is productive to everyone. We want to aggregate all that data.
The GIoBI normalizer is a search engine that links all databases and links references and names “taxonomies”.. Once we have a linked data set we can manipulate and access it in as many ways as you wish. You can ask what Sea Otters eat and get a clean list of the otters favorite foods. We also want to keep the data updated and current. The process is automated so that if data bases change, the search engine would know and hopefully you will always get the most up to date correct answers
**How to contribute data? He is using Github to render and share some data… you can edit it there too! After collecting data, we need to know if our data is complete… How complete is the list of species that have been seen in open data sets? Taking birds as an example, assuming that we know the total number of species via the Meyer research paper, we could calculate the % of completeness for birds present in 4 Islands (the testing sample)
The issue is, how do we motivate people to share their data with them? We are contacting 4 researchers in 4 different Islands and persuade them to share their data with us. Hackathon style approach, add more organisms, back story, distribute the hackathons.