As some of you know, DR (the Danish broadcasting company) has decided to turn 2018 into a ‘year of science’ (https://www.dr.dk/om-dr/nyheder/video-2018-staar-i-videnskabens-tegn-i-dr). In this regard, there are very interesting possibilities for research dissemination and for participating in a large-scale unique research project (especially, for those involved in individual-level social science research).

If you are interested in hearing more, you are hereby invited to a small workshop. Everyone are welcome!

At the meeting, we will be visited by Jacob Sherson and his team from the Department of Physics. Jacob is heading the ScienceAtHome-project (https://www.scienceathome.org) and is organising the collaboration with DR. In order to give you a sense of the scope of the possibilities, Jacob writes the following:

The ScienceAtHome project has reached an agreement with the national broadcasting company, DR, to jointly conduct a massive citizen science project in connection with the “Year of Science” theme at DR. We have developed a new citizen science game in which the idea is that we through a few minutes of game play will be able to extract a broad cognitive and psycho-motoric profile of the player (with their full knowing consent of course). The plan is, in collaboration with DR, to run a calibration phase in May-June, in which 1-10 thousand specially dedicated volunteers will be invited to play both the new games and go through a broad portfolio of existing, validated psychological tests. This will provide the data to calibrate the underlying model linking individual combinations of features in the new games with the cognitive traits of the player.

Once this is established, we have together with DR planned a major event in Week 36, in which we will try to convince as many Danes as possible to participate in a national cognitive profiling project. DR will be promoting the event over a broad range of their platforms. Apart from the bare cognitive profiling, we intend to let the participants answer a range of questions posed by researchers in various fields who would be interested in pairing their research questions with personal cognitive profiles.

For this project, we invite a broad participation of AU researchers at two stages of event. First, for the calibration phase in May-June, DR has asked for a list of interesting AU-research stories related broadly to the topic of human cognition and problem solving as well as collective social interactions. DR then plans to feature these stories throughout the period and at the bottom of each have a link to the project home page on a dr.dk subsite. We believe that the topic is so broadly defined that it will be relevant to many AU-researchers to communicate their research through this venue.

Secondly, we will invite short research proposals from researchers with specific research questions that could benefit from having the possibility of correlating to cognitive profiles.

At the workshop, we will present briefly the details of the game and the cognitive traits to be profiled. We will also explain our ideas for how you could participate in the two stages of the project. Finally, we will give a brief outline of our work to comply with the upcoming GDPR data regulations.

We hope to see many of you there!

Best,
Michael (Bang Petersen)