Citizen science - engagement and empowerment

12/16/22 • 39 min

CORDIScovery – unearthing the hottest topics in EU science, research and innovation

Enthusiasts, people with hobbies, with spare time or concerned about their environment – you and me: all of us are potential collectors of data and information that can add a dimension to research projects. How can participation empower volunteers? And what’s the benefit for scientists? Listen on to find out!

Xavier Basagaña is associate research professor at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health. Basagaña’s CitieS-Health project was interested in evaluating the health impacts of urban living. The project set out to encourage collaboration between researchers and volunteers, to generate solid, unbiased scientific evidence.

Professor of Environmental History at the University of Stavanger in Norway, Finn Arne Jørgensen is the coordinator of the EnviroCitizen project. The team wanted to understand the ways in which citizen science projects can be used to cultivate new ways of thinking and acting in all aspects of life, to promote environmental, rather than national, citizenship.

Kris Vanherle is a transport policy researcher, working at Transport & Mobility Leuven, a spin-off of the University of Leuven, Belgium. Vanherle was the coordinator of WeCount, which wanted to give people the tools they needed to monitor traffic, and to co-design solutions to tackle a variety of road transport challenges.

For more info on the projects featured, visit: https://europa.eu/!fvVNMg

For more info on the projects featured, visit: https://europa.eu/!fvVNMg

Previous Episode

Magic tricks for crows: how animals experience the world

Perform a magic trick for a member of the crow family and it will show how startled it is by the unexpected. Crows are known for being the Einsteins of the avian world, but what about the animals that feed us, clothe us, entertain us – what is the nature of their intelligence? Will our growing realisation that animals may be experiencing the world around them in ways that would surprise us, reframe our understanding of animal welfare? Tune in for some ideas.

Jonathan Birch is an associate professor at the London School of Economics’ Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science. In 2021, the review he led into the sentience of invertebrates resulted in the amendment of the British government’s Animal Welfare Bill to include octopuses, crabs and lobsters.

Associate professor at the University of Leuven’s Animal and Human Health Engineering Unit, Tomas Norton leads research on sustainable precision livestock farming and is particularly interested in the interface between animal health, welfare and productivity.

Nicola Clayton is a fellow of the Royal Society and professor of Comparative Cognition in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge. Nicola is particularly interested in the processes of thinking with and without words, comparing the cognitive capacities of corvids, cephalopods and children.

For more info on the projects featured, visit: https://europa.eu/!BFNQ97

Next Episode

Advances in forensics

New technologies, existing technologies applied to new challenges, understanding the role of cross-cultural influences in eyewitnesses’ examinations; all ways in which EU projects are helping to make evidence more accessible. This episode of CORDIScovery investigates.

Rape is a global scourge. Millions of unsolved rape cases fail in the absence of evidence found. Current technical barriers to the identification and analysis of sperm traces are one key reason. The Themis project has developed a new technique that can find traces which would be missed by conventional methods and analyses them more quickly and effectively.

What happens when you take green screens, gaming technology, lidar and other cutting-edge imaging techniques and apply them to evidence long buried? The Dig-For-Arch project has developed ways these tools can clarify crime scenes that might currently be hard to interpret.

Our globalised world means cultures are interrelating more than ever – what happens when eyewitnesses give evidence in cross-cultural contexts? How do we unravel information through a cultural filter? The WEIRD WITNESSES project has some interesting findings to share.

This episode of CORDIScovery features three guests who are ideally placed to tell us about the latest advances that are helping to refine criminal investigations. Their projects have all been supported by the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme.

Annelies Vredeveldt is an associate professor at the Faculty of Law at VU Amsterdam. She investigates psychology in the courtroom, from how eyewitnesses remember crimes to detecting lies in suspects’ statements. Dante Abate is an associate researcher at the Cyprus Institute. His various areas of interest include the application of digital and non-destructive technologies for the identification and documentation of historic crime scenes. Benjamin Corgier is currently the research and development director at AXO Science, a biotech company specialising in molecular biology and innovative technologies for forensics.

For more info on the projects featured, visit: https://europa.eu/!Mrn7k8