Why cloud could make crowdsourcing the norm for scientists
If you’re tired of hearing about cloud computing and big data, you might want to wear earplugs for the next year or so. These two trends are only going to get hotter, in large part because they’re also becoming ideal bedfellows. This is especially true in the world of science, where the cloud provides an ideal platform for crowdsourcing scientific problems across the whole world of researchers, giving them access to data sets and the computing resources to analyze them.
Generally speaking, we’ve already seen how crowdsourcing can be an effective method for solving big data problems. The Netflix Prize challenge in 2009 attracted more than 50,000 participants trying to improve Netflix’s Cinematch algorithm, and today we have Kaggle — an entire company dedicated to hosting competitions for companies trying to crowdsource their own analytical challenges. And it’s the cloud, with its centralized nature, virtually unlimited and on-demand resources, that makes it possible to have so many people access and work with the same data sets at the same time…