Another site dedicated to crowdsourcing modeling of protein folding is fold. Crowdsourced data also acts as a honeypot for medical technology and pharmaceutical companies – collecting data to create vaccines and cures through conventional research and development initiatives is hugely time-consuming and expensive. 



Currently, information is being collated in order to make freely-available databases of solutions and services that have emerged in response to coronavirus around the world, as well as to highlight areas where more investigation is required into the impact of the virus. Of course, we can play our part by staying inside and preventing germs from spreading. will be on overall statistics. Of course, once this terrible epidemic is under control, the next challenge will be keeping the momentum going to develop new solutions that will hopefully stop future pandemics occurring in the first place These are all great examples of projects and initiatives that just wouldn’t have been possible during previous pandemics and epidemics – simply because the infrastructure to collect and process data at the necessary scale wasn’t available, and there weren’t as many ways – such as social media - to encourage people to get involved. And they could play an important part in limiting the loss of life caused by this pandemic. 


The amount of computing power donated to the project since it began tackling COVID-19 has now exceeded one exaFLOP – that’s 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 computing operations per second! If you don’t have spare computing power, another option is to donate your data. One current ongoing challenge involves designing a protein with anti-inflammatory properties, to assist in treating patients whose immune systems have triggered excess inflammation – a side-effect of coronavirus infection that can be life-threatening. And Innocentive is another crowdsourcing portal that has launched a number of initiatives aimed at gathering data on the best way to combat COVID-19. On a personal level, they can also be useful for learning more about how crowdsourced data is being used to solve global problems today. If you already have some knowledge and experience of data science, then you will find lots of things you can potentially help out with over at Kaggle, Google's crowdsourced data science portal. 

Establishing which symptoms are likely to mean you just have a cold, and which mean you should get tested, helps to ensure people can isolate at the right time to prevent the coronavirus from spreading. Their data has helped to establish that loss of smell and taste are among the most common indicators – a fact not widely recognized in the early days of the outbreak. Thanks to the internet, social media, and Big Data-driven analytics, there are a number of projects anyone can get involved with from home. If your own unique situation has led to you developing some specialist knowledge or strategies, this could be a place to share them. Many of us who aren’t healthcare workers or scientists may be feeling a bit useless right now in the face of over two million coronavirus cases worldwide. 

All you need to do to get involved with this is to download the client and run it on your machine. it, and here too you can take part in a number of puzzles that, while fun and educational, could also help with making important scientific advances. This project uses machine learning to do just that, and so far, over two million people have signed up. For a crowdsourced collection of information designed to be parsed by humans rather than machines, look no further than the Coronavirus Tech Handbook project, led by “crisis taxonomist” Edward Saperia. These are initiatives that wouldn’t have been available during past endemics and pandemics when our ability to collaboratively collect and interpret data was less developed. Folding@Home is a long-running crowdsourced project that uses donated computing power to simulate protein folding, as well as to help tackle other medical data problems. Luckily technology once again provides an answer. Most of these initiatives are powered by data and demonstrate how using crowdsourcing to crunch through data can improve our chances of beating the disease. Since the COVID-19 outbreak, it has begun using the spare power of "idle" computers in people's homes to crunch through data, in the hope of identifying proteins in the virus that could be targeted with medicine. While a great way to get involved and learn more about data science, if you're familiar with the basics, other organizations are offering ways to help out if you don't have that particular skill set or the time to develop it. The C-19 Symptom 


Tracker app has been developed by researchers at King's College London and collects anonymized information to help correlate symptoms and diagnosed cases of COVID-19. With live datasets from the World Health Organization collated by Johns Hopkins University, as well as a library of 29,000 published articles, you can put your skills to work by taking on tasks including predicting the spread of the virus, how long it is likely to affect certain parts of the world, or what the impact of factors such as weather, economy, etc. But knowing others are putting their lives on the line, we may be wishing we could do a bit more. This started as a collection of medical information aimed mainly at doctors and healthcare professionals, but it has quickly grown into a compendium of knowledge and advice on subjects from hygiene and staying safe, to coping with home working and schooling.