bashthebug.net alpha launch Philip Fowler, 3rd October 20166th April 2017 I’m planning to launch a citizen science project, bashthebug.net, in 2017 which has two distinct ways anyone can help combat antibiotic resistance. I’ve revamped and relaunched what will ultimately become the public-facing project website – please have a look. The first strand is closer to the light of day and will help the international Tuberculosis consortium, CRyPTIC. This global group of researchers, of which I am a part, will be collecting over 100,000 samples from patients with TB. Each sample will be tested to see which antibiotics are effective as well as having the genome of its M.tuberculosis bacterium sequenced. In practice, because each sample is measured at least three different times, that means looking at 300,000 96-well plates. Step forward Zooniverse! This type of large-scale image classification is exactly the sort of thing Zooniverse Citizen Science projects excel at. I hope to launch this project in early 2017. The second citizen science project is more complex and I have recently applied for funding. As described in my Research, I am developing methods that can predict whether novel or rarely-observed mutations cause resistance to an antibiotic (or not). These require a lot of computer resource and the idea is to build a volunteer computing project, like [climate prediction.net](http://climate prediction.net), using the BOINC framework, so that volunteers can download a program onto their laptop or desktop. When they’re not using their computer, the program will retrieve part of a problem and run the simulations on their machine before returning the results over the internet. These type of project is more complicated and requires more infrastructure to be setup, but with some luck, I’d hope to have a soft launch late in 2017. Share this: Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X Click to share on Bluesky (Opens in new window) Bluesky Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn Click to share on Mastodon (Opens in new window) Mastodon Related citizen science computing distributed computing
computing Software Carpentry Workshop, Jülich, 12-13 October 2015 23rd October 2015 Last week, myself and David Dotson from ASU, ran a 2 day Software Carpentry workshop… Share this: Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X Click to share on Bluesky (Opens in new window) Bluesky Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn Click to share on Mastodon (Opens in new window) Mastodon Read More
antimicrobial resistance BashTheBug Coordinator post advertised 15th November 2019 We are advertising for a Part-time Citizen Science Project Co-ordinator to come and work with… Share this: Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X Click to share on Bluesky (Opens in new window) Bluesky Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn Click to share on Mastodon (Opens in new window) Mastodon Read More
antimicrobial resistance New paper: a deep learning model that reads MICs from images of 96 well plates 26th May 20251st July 2025 Our paper describing how a convolutional neural network model can determine the minimum inhibitory concentrations… Share this: Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X Click to share on Bluesky (Opens in new window) Bluesky Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn Click to share on Mastodon (Opens in new window) Mastodon Read More