Note: these are running notes for LIFT ‘08.  For more complete blog coverage, check out the official LIFT Conference blog or LunchOverIP.

François Grey is the Head of IT Communications at CERN, the Switzerland-based research center most widely known as the birthplace of the web and home to the world’s largest scientific instrument, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In addition to smashing participles and looking for new ones, when the LHC begins operations later this year, it will produce roughly 15 Petabytes (15 million gigabytes) of data annually.  To analyze the mountains of the data the project will rely on the LHC Grid, a globally distributed network of computers. The approach is similar to that used by SETI @ Home which taps into the spare computing power of millions of volunteer computers to download and analyze radio telescope data in search of extraterrestrial life. The idea is catching on: Grey says today there are dozens of distributed computing projects in fields such as molecular biology, climatology and particle physics; the Sony PS3 is pre-loaded with software to enable it to connect with Folding@Home, aStanford-based project that’s studying protein folding.

A unique culture has evolved around distributed computing projects, creating tight-knit communities of volunteers.  To incentivize participation projects like SETI give volunteers “credits” for donating computing time; individuals and teams self-organize and compete to donate the most hours.  Message boards act as a social networking site for volunteers and individual profiles make participation in the project personal: Matthew Tine (aka Stainmaster) is a 32-year old Australian who has been a SETI@home member since 2000 and has to date donated over 18,000 hours of CPU time.

Grey says is science taking the distributed network concept one step further, from volunteer computing to “volunteer thinking”.  As he describes it: a new generation of projects is emerging that taps into not only the computers, but the brains of the volunteers, inviting them to analyze scientific data online: cataloguing galaxies, scouring microscope images, or mapping out remote regions.  For instance, Galaxy Zoo taps armchair astronomers to help scientists classify galaxies by looking at images and identifying whether it’s a spiral or an elliptical galaxy.  Using legions of people is not only efficient, it’s also more effective: collectively human brains are better than computers at pattern recognition, and algorithms would invariably throw out the “unusual, weird or wonderful” patterns that would attract the attention of a curious human.

Herbaria at Home is using a similar crowd-sourcing approach digitize and document the world’s largest collections of herbarium specimens; another project, AfricaMap seeks to create more accurate cartographic maps of Africa by asking volunteers to look at satellite images over the African continent and search for roads, bridges, human settlements, rivers, agriculture fields, etc.

Distributed computing has spawned distributed thinking, a trend Grey calls “citizen cyberscience”, or philanthropic crowdsourcing. It’s a fascinating concept and one that could mobilize an army of amateur scientists into service.

I attended LIFT 07 last week in Geneva. I expected to my brain to be treated to a healthy feast of high quality food and I was not disappointed. From start to finish, I was immersed in a luminous bath of ideas. Thanks to Ben Cerverny for my new favorite term ?Luminous Bath?.

Now for some random thoughts about LIFT 07, only half digested??

Florence Devouard, Chair of the board of Wikipedia asked if Wikipedia was an innovation or a utopia; my thought, it’s neither; it’s a ?Noostopia?.

Jan-Christoph Zoels? posed interesting questions in his presentation Jumping Jack Flash. Do you crave immediate attentionWhat is the mobile equivalent of someone grabbing your armWould you like to take over your friend’s phoneNokia is asking these and other questions because they want to find out how best to connect kids to their parents via mobile phones. WhyBecause the fastest growing market segment for mobile phone is kids ages 6-8. This made me think??

Revenge of the Blackberry Orphans I read an article in the Wall Street Journal about a new phenomenon, Blackberry Orphans. These Blackberry Orphans resent the intrusion of the device into their home life and some are beginning to fight back. One child became so resentful and frustrated that she tried to flush her mother’s Blackberry down the toilet. What will happen when kids can hijack their parentsmobile devices and delete all the contacts, or appointments or the presentation they’re giving in the afternoon?

Julian Bleecker’s First Life Meets Second Life presentation made me think about the ecological impact of our 2^nd lives on our 1^st life and world. How do you account for your 2^nd lifeDo you realize that every bit of digital data has real world dataDo you know that our 1^st life supports our 2^nd life?

In the Oct. 16, 06 FringeHog podcast I questioned whether or not virtual worlds were sustainable in the segment Grey Goo & Griefers. I must admit I had not considered whether or not our 2^nd lives were ecologically sustainable. Julian quoted some thought provoking statistics from Nicholas Carr’s blog. For example: An avatar on average consumes 1,752 kWh per year while the ?average humanconsumes 2,436 kWh; a little bit more than an avatar. The average Second Life avatar consumes as much electricity as an average Brazilian.

Beth Krasna of ThinkStudio shifted my thinking about emerging business models. I?m still ruminating about the implications of her Direct Everything economy. And more than, that I?m thinking about the simple 2 -axis matrix she shared with us ?LIFTers?. She demonstrated how to use the matrix to resolve issues of transferring production from the producer to the consumer. Not only that, it can be used for historical analysis, market analysis, strategic analysis and positioning analysis. I?d like to see how it could work as a foresight tool. For an incisive summary of the Direct Economy check out Bruno Giussani’s blog Lunch over IP

I don’t know what to say about Brian Cox other than that he is a rock star particle physicist who works at CERN who made muons, electrons, Higgs Particles, quarks, and the ATLAS project under construction at CERN understandable to the non-scientist.

Requotables:

?Design predicts the future when it anticipates experience?Augusto Morello

?Better to solve root causes of problems rather than work around it?Jan Chipchase

?All science is either physics or stamp collectingErnest Rutherford

That’s all for now… I’ll post more about my LIFT 07 experience as I digest it.