Researchers at the Schaffer-Nishimura Biomedical Engineering Lab of Cornell University are looking into the relationship between cardiovascular disease and the onset of Alzheimer's. To do so, they've gamified the gargantuan data labelling tasks involved in a citizen science project called Stall Catchers, which distributes videos of cerebral vasculature to players and trains them to identify stalled capillaries.

The game, which has to be available to players and serving lots of rich multimedia content 24/7, uses Microsoft Azure to run its infrastructure. As put by Vani Mandava, the Director of Data Science for Microsoft Research Outreach, “Being able to use the cloud for the end-to-end workflow that includes running the analytic pipeline efficiently and hosting the game is an exciting approach that could be extended to many other crowdsourcing problems. This was a remarkable opportunity that started with a seed of an idea, an Azure grant, and several external and internal teams that came together in this massive consensus driven impact that anyone can participate in.”

Full article: https://blog.scistarter.org/2019/05/citizen-scientists-set-new-record-for-accelerating-alzheimers-research/

Stall Catchers: https://stallcatchers.com/