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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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,
humor,
humility,
good spirit,
and grace,
Thank you all! Much respect for the work that you've done and the character you've shown!
Note this post was updated on 2018.03.12 to correct an error and on 2018.03.19 to add a link