CitSciMedBlitz Recap and Results

Posted on by ginger

Hopefully, you'll all forgive us for the delay in announcing the results of #CitSciMedBlitz. Our partners at EyesOnAlz, Cochrane crowd, and ourselves were a little tired after the blitz and we gave ourselves a short break. Since the blitz, the EyesOnAlz team has generated the #CitSciMedBlitz digital badge for participants of all three challenges and has been working on creating the trophies; meanwhile, the Cochrane crowd team has contacted the overall #CitSciMedBlitz event winners.

look alive now! We're all up and active now and looking forward to sharing a recap and the results of #CitSciMedBlitz with you.

First, a Recap

On February 21st, CitSciMedBlitz was kicked off with a webinar to introduce the three platforms that would be participating in CitSciMedBlitz
You can watch the webinar here

The first challenge, the StallCatchers challenge, was launched on February 26th at 7am PST. Within minutes of the launch, StallCatchers were hammering away at StallCatchers, including Cochrane Crowd's Anna.
first 10 min

Anna managed to get on the leaderboard but wasn't able to stay on there for very long because the competition was just too tough. At least she placed, though-- I never even made it!

By the end of the challenge, StallCatchers analyzed a whopping 18,348 real videos--the equivalent of two weeks worth of laboratory analysis!
first 10 min

While the EyesOnAlz team was still cooling off from their intense challenge, we were gearing up for the Mark2Cure arm--and NOT without a huge set of worries.
i am worried

You can read more about the hiccups and snafu's that happened during the Mark2Cure 24hr challenge here. By the end of the challenge, CitSciMedBlitzers managed to submit ~300 doc annotations, and ~3000 relationship annotations--an impressive feat considering the increase in task difficulty, and the bugs and other technical issues that made the challenge--well, even more challenging!

While we were busy analyzing the results of our challenge, Cochrane crowd was preparing the last challenge of CitSciMedBlitz. This challenge started off right with 50 assessments within the first 2 minutes, and over 5000 in just the first 4 hours! This arm of the challenge would determine which of the top contenders from the previous challenges would win the trophy so the competition was intense! By the end of this challenge, over 46,000 classifications would be made--allowing our teams to determine the overall winner of #CitSciMedBlitz.

And now...the results of CitSciMedBlitz...

Of course, the biggest winner of the challenge goes to...

...biomedical and health evidence research! Everyone who has contributed (in the past) and continues to contributes to these efforts deserve a round of applause for being generous enough to donate their time towards helping with disease and health research.

Thank you for being amazing

The winner of the CitSciMedBlitz trophy is Michael Landau! Note, it was previously stated that Michael was also the top contributor to the EyesOnAlz challenge of CitSciMedBlitz. This is wrong.

Mike Capraro was the top contributor across all three measures of the EyesOnAlz challenge and the overall top contributor of that challenge for CitSciMedBlitz.

Editor's note #2: If you'd like to read more about CitSciMedBlitz from the EyesOnAlz team, check out their latest recap post here!

The top contributor to the Mark2Cure arm of CitSciMedBlitz was Kien Pong Yap, while the top contributor to the Cochrane Crowd arm of CitSciMedBlitz was Nikolaos. The top contributors to each platform will be receiving a platform-specific trophy.

Each platform will be awarding additional prizes to some of their top contributors and the notifications should be arriving via email (if they haven't already).

Editor's note #3, the recap from the Cochrane Crowd side of things is now available

Now that all the excitement of CitSciMedBlitz is over, I'd like to thank ALL the citizen scientists who contribute to projects like ours and make these platforms great. In citizen science, the people make the platform. And, as you can see--the people contributing to these platforms, do so with:

a collaborative spirit,
sharing is caring

humor,
guilt to the rescue

humility,
struggled and won

good spirit,
positive attitude for the win

and grace,
positive attitude for the win

Thank you all! Much respect for the work that you've done and the character you've shown!

mad respects

Note this post was updated on 2018.03.12 to correct an error and on 2018.03.19 to add a link

CitSciMedBlitz Update

Posted on by ginger

The results for Mark2Cure's arm of the CitSciBlitz are now available! Kien Pong Yap took the top spot in this challenge (see ranking at bottom of post).

What's exciting is that several of these names were also in the top 10 for the StallCatchers challenge so it'll be a tough competition in the Cochrane challenge to see who actually wins the CitSciMedBlitz triple challenge trophy.

Here are some random tidbits about the Mark2Cure arm of the CitSciMedBlitz triple challenge:

  • The NER module was broken for the first few hours of the challenge, and we received emails and phone calls about it within the first hour of the challenge. THANK YOU for bringing it to our attention and providing so detailed information about the bugs. Max was able to solve it while on the airplane ride to San Diego for the Future of Genomic Medicine Conference.

  • In spite of the NER module issues (a HUGE thanks to TAdams, JudyE, AJEckhart, and Itwontalwaysbelikethis for helping us troubleshoot), users doing this task still managed to climb the ranks even with the delayed start.

  • A Mark2Curator created an introductory video about the relationship extraction task for the event while we were running around trying to ensure that everything was in place for the M2C challenge. THANK YOU for doing that, TAdams!

  • One of the Mark2Curators joined the challenge as a personal challenge to raise awareness for dystonia on Rare Disease Day. Dystonia = loss of muscle control. There are many types, but you can imagine just how much more challenging that makes things! Read about her efforts here. And if you're curious how well she did--she made it to the top 5!

  • I was worried about following StallCatchers because their task is so visually appealing while ours is text based and quite difficult. Indeed we got questions and suggestions-a-plenty about Mark2Cure on the StallCatchers forum, but there are plenty of very tenacious citizen scientists in stall catchers and they managed to climb pretty high in the ranks.

  • The team behind StallCatchers is AMAZING!!!! Very generous with both support and humor! No wonder the StallCatchers are so ardent!

If you think it's all over--think again! The Cochrane crowd of the challenge has just started, and CitSciMedBlitzers who participate in all THREE challenges will get a digital badge on their StallCatchers profile. It's an awesome badge!

Now go take the cochrane challenge!

citscimedblitz mark2cure rankings