At the present time, we are searching for new research projects, specifically the next research projects. In fact, the World Community Grid team has one person dedicated to doing just that.

What we are finding is the researchers really get excited about having the compute power of World Community Grid is available to them, but we are also finding that the existing research was designed for using more traditional means of computing power… mainframes and the like. However we are making some inroads in some new projects which are just now starting. We recently spoke with the director of the World Health Organization who is aware of some new research starting out on Dengue fever: http://www.who.int/csr/disease/dengue/en/

The scientists who are running Human Proteome Folding (HPF) on World Community Grid have committed doing a newsletter on the progress of HPF and posting that in the HPF forum every few weeks. We’ll make sure that happens because we are as interested in the progress of HPF as you are.

Every member of World Community Grid can help with finding new research. If you know of someone who has some potential research, please point them to the page where they can submit a request to run their research on World Community Grid: http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/about_us/request_for_proposals.html
The only requirements are that it has to come from a Not-for-profit organization and that the research must alleviate human suffering. We do not charge anything for running research on World Community Grid. We even board their application for them.

Even if you don’t know someone in a research organization, please feel free to send information about World Community Grid to organizations which potentially have research or have access to researchers. Your help would be greatly appreciated.

David,
It’s Greek to me too. Let’s not get too narrowly focused. The real purpose of the World Community Grid is to use computers in ways that help people. In practice, this seems to come down to donating computer time to scientific researchers working on projects that might help people. Medical research is an obvious possibility, and recently people have begun speaking of fields called Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. Using Google to search for these terms, it turns out that the National Science Foundation (NSF) is pouring money into computers to use in these fields.

I have no feel for what possibilities there are and no real idea of how to rank them for utility and practicality. Studying the proteins in the human body strikes me as a useful way to use our computers. There seems to be a very good chance that some medical researcher will be able to make good use of the data we are creating.

If nothing better pops up, as long as we have a working program for proteins, I would cheerfully crunch away on a protein analysis of deadly microorganisms such as malaria and dengue fever and schistosomiasis and also on useful crops such as rice. It might be useful to run a search on Google to see what sorts of projects people are talking about in the same articles that mention Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. We are not a very high profile organization and there are probably many researchers around the world that have never heard of us. Perhaps some of them would have good ideas that we could support.

Lawrence

Bruce,
You raise a very good point:
This touches on a basic point in the philosophy of the World Community Grid organizational design. The projects are selected by the Advisory Board, composed of distinguished scientists and scientific admistrators. Our projects are selected by peer review rather than by popularity contest.

There are any number of open public distributed computer projects. Many of them are in Number Theory, searching for primes. It all reminds me of a scene in Arthur C. Clarke's "The City and the Stars". All of these projects, like us, are competing for members in a democratic popularity contest. What distinguishes us from the pack is that we offer peer-reviewed projects, selected by the Advisory Board.

I hope that we will always select projects based on their potential rather than on their popularity or unpopularity. We ought to find ourselves sometimes running projects in fields that are also being explored by corporate laboratories expecting profitable discoveries. Linus Torvalds has a very soft-voiced, low-key explanation of why people trying to be useful should often find themselves in competitive commercial areas and should not flee them just because money is involved.

Our results are public domain. This means that they can be used by any corporation. But a corporation cannot patent, license, or restrict their use. Or more realistically, they can try to but their lawyers would probably content themselves with threats and phony lawsuiits run on the cheap.

Lawrence

[Grin] You are right, Dev. There are a lot of good projects out there. Those weren't the ones I happened to be thinking of as I was writing my post. But also keep in mind that the Advisory Board includes members who work for NIH and NSF, the two funding organizations you specifically mentioned.