Jan Simson: 5 Years of Citizen Science - Lessons Learned and Software Built

SEMINAR ABSTRACT
In early 2019 Jan visited Samuel Mehr as an intern and helped to quietly launch themusiclab.org, a citizen science platform where people can take part in gamified experiments, typically related to the perception of music. In the 5 1/2 years that followed, the platform has attracted more than 5,000,000 players from across the world and provided data for multiple publications. To get it there, they had to navigate surprise (and sometimes overnight) peaks in traffic, technical difficulties, bugs and the integration of various studies over time.
They used their learnings across the past few years to inform the development of a new software backend which has been powering the site over the last year. The software, titled World-Wide-Lab is available as free and open-source software, developed specifically to easily collect online citizen science data, with a special eye on enabling the gamification of studies.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Jan Simson is currently a doctoral candidate at the Konrad Zuse School for Excellence in Reliable AI and the Department of Statistics at the LMU Munich. Besides his research, he gives professional workshops with a focus on technical skills such as using git effectively.
Jan graduated with a Master of Science in Psychology: Behavioural Data Science from the Universiteit van Amsterdam and just after, worked as a data analyst at PicNic, a Dutch grocery startup. Previously, he spent a year working as a research fellow at the Harvard Music Lab (now at Yale & Auckland), where they study the perception of music and with whom he still collaborates.
He enjoys solving hard problems and combine insights and methods from Data Science, Psychology and Computer Science in his work.
Before he started working at the Harvard Music Lab, Jan finished his Bachelor of Science in Psychology at the University of Konstanz in Germany. During his Bachelor in Psychology, he spent a year abroad at the University of Essex in the UK. Before starting his academic studies, Jan completed a vocational education as a Specialized Computer Scientist in Software Development at three-2-one in Germany, for whom he continued working throughout the whole of his academic studies.
ABOUT THE SEMINAR SERIES
In this event in a series, speakers from within the Hub, the University, and the broader research community tell us about their research. Our Research Seminar Series involves speakers covering a broad range of themes surrounding our Hub’s interests, so we’ll hopefully all learn something interesting. Whether you want to learn to inform your own research or to simply satisfy a personal curiosity, we hope to see you there.