About Curio

Curio is a crowdsourcing platform that connects interested citizens with researchers to help answer important questions in the sciences and humanities. We believe that curiosity, or the desire to ask and answer questions, is what makes researchers who they are.

Why should you join Curio? As a participant, you will be able to

• encounter a variety of interesting questions researchers ask in the natural, medical and social sciences
• collect intriguing scientific objects in your personal "curio cabinet"
• keep track of your work and achievements
• contribute to science while earning special rewards
• join a vibrant community of users who share similar interests

We invite everyone to bring their curiosity and join us!

For Scientists

If you are a researcher in the sciences or humanities, our platform is designed to support and augment your research workflow.

We provide tools that allow researchers to

• create new crowdsourcing projects within minutes
• open your project to the general public, or invite more specialized crowds (e.g., students, paid workers and other researchers)
• monitor and control various aspects of the crowdsourcing process
• visualize and debug the crowdsourced results
• communicate with participants in a meaningful and efficient way

If you are interested in using Curio, please sign up to be notified about the launch or contact us directly by email at research@crowdcurio.com

Our Team

Project Leader
Edith Law
CRCS Postdoctoral Fellow

Faculty Advisor
Krzysztof Gajos
Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Undergraduate Students
Albert Young
Anna Kiyantseva
Conner Dalton
Nicholas Merrill
Zach Hamed

We are constantly looking for new ways to make Curio better. Please send any thoughts, feedback or questions to feedback@crowdcurio.com

Project Spotlight

"How have environmental and climate changes shaped flowering times in New England over the last 160 years?"
— Prof. Charles Davis (Harvard) and Prof. Richard Primack (BU)

Climate change affects seasonal biological events and species’ diversity. Using museum specimens and field notes, we can detect the signature of climate change using the timing of biological events like flowering. While best known as an author and philosopher, Henry David Thoreau was a keen observer of nature—he kept detailed records on the plants that he encountered near Walden Pond, including when they flowered. The Harvard University Herbaria (HUH) has hundreds of thousands of plant specimens collected from throughout New England over the past 160 years, including Thoreau's.

In the Thoreau's Field Notes project, you are invited to help digitize field notes and evaluate when plants flowered in the past as a way to understand how flowering times have changed during the past 160 years and what environmental factors are leading to these changes.

Project Spotlight

"What did people have in their households in the cities of Mediterranean Europe between 1300 and 1500?"
— Prof. Dan Smail (Harvard)

As a historian, I am fascinated by the household inventories and other documents found in archives that reveal what kinds of things people once owned and used. In the Medieval Open House project, we invite you to help us transcribe and translate old documents from medieval cities to figure out what these things were. In some cases, the original words are hard to translate: the documents are all written in Latin or another European language. In other cases, we don't know exactly what the object looked like or how it was used.

We invite people who have some knowledge of Latin, who love exploring online museum records, or who have specialized knowledge of any kind (e.g., about old tools, household items, and old fashion styles) to help us figure out what these objects were and what they were used for.

Project Spotlight

"What organic molecules are the most efficient for use in solar cells?"
— Prof. Alan Aspuru-Guzik (Harvard)

There are billions of people on the planet who do not have electricity. The goal of the Molecule Designer project is to develop cheap solar materials that are organic, flexible and lightweight. These materials can be mounted on rooftops and coupled to batteries to collect the energy to power small, everyday applications. To date, we have little understanding about the properties of organic molecules that make up good materials for use in solar cells. As a result, our algorithms have to search through an infinite space to find the best molecules.

In this project, chemists and non-chemists alike are invited to become molecule designers and join the search for the ideal molecules for harvesting renewable energy from the sun.