Collectively intelligent

Is going it alone a model of the past? Researchers are pointing the way, increasingly relying on a new togetherness. To tackle problems such as diseases and climate change, they turn to the wisdom of crowds, citizen science observations, and even share knowledge among competitors.

The girl with the missing tooth laughs infectiously in a way that probably only six-year-olds can. But then, suddenly, as if she had just been pushed by an evil spirit, Kamiyah staggers – and falls over. Luckily, her mother is there to catch her. She is all too familiar with these mysterious fainting and paralysis attacks that strike the girl from the U.S. state of South Dakota dozens of times every day. Hundreds of kilometers away, in Maryland, the neuroscientist Andrea Meredith will see a video of Kamiyah’s attacks on her iPad. She knows the symptoms well. Meredith will write an email, and ultimately she will become part of a crowdsourcing experiment which, as Meredith puts it, “has fundamentally changed this child’s life, but also my life as a researcher.”

Up until 2019, Meredith’s professional life primarily took place in the ­laboratory. As a professor, she examines the exchange of potassium between cells – and how disruption to that exchange can disturb processes in the brain. It is a specialized field to which only a small number of researchers are dedicated. “In our model, we have already given a good description of genetic defects that can trigger neurological disorders, but we had hardly any idea of the real impact that this has on patients,” she says.

When the researcher visited the New York Times website and by chance saw a video of Kamiyah, whose attacks look like someone pulled a plug, she was electrified: “I knew that I could now put the pieces of the puzzle together with everything that I know about the illness.” Meredith got in touch with the ­newspaper, which, together with the Netflix streaming service, was asking the crowd online for tips on diagnosing mysterious illnesses – and thus set the ball rolling in Kamiyah’s case.

Thanks to the many responses that poured in from all over the world following an appearance in the Netflix documentary, “we became like giant antennae gathering and pooling information,” Meredith says. Sufferers from all over the world reached out, networked among themselves – and with Meredith’s research team. Thanks to crowdsourcing, individual people with rare illnesses turned into a critical mass with great scope for action. “Patients joined together to become medical detectives investigating their own cases. One ­family found a medicine that suppresses the stimuli which trigger the sudden paralysis attacks. They shared their findings on social media and were able to help other sufferers to stop those attacks almost completely,” she says. Meredith has now set up an organization to take knowledge that is spread all over the world and use it for more patient-centered research. “Families, scientists and doctors can now learn together how this rare genetic defect works and what can be done to counter it,” she says.

Crowdsourcing, or using swarm ­intelligence to solve tricky problems, is a concept that seems to fit well into a time when challenges are often too complex for individuals alone to come up with a magic formula to solve them. Experts open themselves up in the hope that the wisdom of crowds – or one individual in that crowd – may show them the way, or at least offer them a new perspective. In the face of great challenges, the idea of joint action literally forces itself on us and offers grounds for optimism.

Competitive thinking? Passé!

The chemical industry is also facing an enormous task: the transformation to climate-friendly production. To do this, it is steering a course toward being open. In several areas, BASF has opened up its innovation practices to promote low-emission processes. Together with competitors, suppliers and customers, the company is pursuing experimental paths to develop new, sustainable ­technologies – for example, in processes that are still too costly and uncertain in their outcomes to be tackled alone.

This is the case with a pilot project on electrically heated steam cracker furnaces. In the future they will be used to fire the large production plants, which are so important to the chemical ­industry at the beginning of the value creation ­process, in an environmentally friendly way. Splitting naphtha into the basic building blocks of olefins and ­aromatics requires temperatures of up to 850 degrees Celsius. Up to now, gas is being burned for this purpose. “This causes high CO₂ emissions, making the plant one of the top emitters in the chemical industry,” says Dr. Andrea Haunert, project lead and technology manager at BASF’s Petrochemicals division. For some years, BASF has been pursuing in-depth work on the idea of powering the cracker ­electrically – with energy from ­renewables instead of natural gas. A large-scale demonstration plant, which will eliminate at least 90 percent of process emissions compared to technologies commonly used today, is due to start operation in 2023. It will be fully integrated into one of the existing steam crackers at BASF’s Verbund site in Ludwigshafen, Germany.

“Initially, we will have to invest a lot,” Haunert says. And yes, she adds, BASF is taking considerable risks: “As always with a research idea, it is uncertain whether our idea is the right one. Will the technology ultimately be successful in the market? That too is far from clear.” One can embark on such a risky venture, she says, only “if you have ­like-minded allies alongside you.” To achieve this, BASF joined forces with technology partner Linde and Saudi ­chemicals giant SABIC – a direct competitor of the Ludwigshafen based company – which also has many years of experience in operating steam crackers.

For BASF, the pilot project is about sharing knowledge among equals and jointly gaining new insights. “Findings from operating this plant will belong to all three partners,” Haunert says. The project received funding from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action under its “­Decarbonization in Industry” funding program. If all goes well, the first steam cracker furnaces could be switched on a large scale from gas to renewable electricity from 2030 onward. “Thanks to our close cooperation and the expertise that the three partners bring, we could be the first in the world to succeed in doing this.”

Undercover citizens hunt mosquitoes  

Joaquín Cochero, too, has experienced how the work of pioneering researchers can have a broad impact thanks to ­networking. The young biologist from ­Buenos Aires is using swarm intelligence to find swarms of mosquitoes. He is an expert on the Egyptian tiger mosquito. Mosquitoes are by far the deadliest creatures in the world. They transmit pathogens for malaria, dengue fever or the Zika virus. “Here in Argentina, dengue in particular is constantly breaking out,” Cochero says. “The swarms migrate further and further southward from the tropical regions in the north. We are able to monitor this ­movement basically in real time, thanks to data from our Caza Mosquitos app.” To track down these problematic species so that outbreaks of infection can be nipped in the bud, the entomologist relies on a crowd of citizen scientists. They are the ones who bring the app to life that has been developed by Cochero.

“Users initially download the app out of self-interest: They want to know whether the mosquito in their house is dangerous. From us they learn more about these creatures and their living conditions. In this way, they experience themselves as part of a collaborative project, and this motivates them to actively participate.” Thanks to their data, ­previously dark spots on the map of the spread of Aaedes aegypti and others are gradually being illuminated. Cochero and his team have now made a quiet alarming observation: “As a consequence of climate change, we are seeing carriers of pathogens in more and more areas where they were not previously common,” he notes. Mosquito swarms are finding ideal breeding grounds particularly in constantly growing cities where overpopulated settlements are struggling with difficult hygiene ­conditions and polluted water and soil.

He sees the prevention of dengue and other epidemics as a shared task. The app, which has been downloaded more than 10,000 times, is making just an initial contribution to this. “Especially in the hands of such a smartphone-oriented society as Argentina, it can be a decentralized early-warning system,” Cochero says. Moreover, it is an important tool for spreading education and information. Schools and local and regional authorities are gradually starting to use Caza Mosquitos. “Our fight against these diseases can only succeed if administrators and policymakers work hand in hand with citizens,” Cochero concludes.

Women power inclusive urban planning

A prime example of what happens when an administration places a city’s development in the hands of its residents can be found on the other side of the world, in Panaji. The capital of the Indian state of Goa is turning into an Urban Living Lab – a real-life laboratory for urban development. On closer examination, the tourist ­metropolis turns out to be a city that has typical urban problems, says the young city planner Bhavya Bogra. It is plagued by traffic chaos on roads “where the needs of several community groups, most of all women, fall by the wayside.” As Bogra soon realized, this urban problem can only be untangled by collaborating with partners in a citizencentered, bottom-up approach.

Smartphones installed on cars took more than 17,000 photos and provided detailed insights. “Most of all, however, we gained the full picture from around 30 women from all walks of life, whom we followed on the routes that they normally take. That was an excellent learning experience,” she says. The Indian women talked about curbs that were broken or too high – impossible to navigate with strollers – and about frightening areas that they have to cross in the dark.

“The women’s ideas form pieces in the puzzle to make up inclusive roads,” Bogra says. An action plan provides for well-lit roads, unobstructed and pedestrian-friendly crossings, and an emergency telephone number for women. The overall plan intends to gradually turn Panaji into an inclusive city for all of its ­citizens – though the coronavirus lockdowns have slowed down this ­process, as Bogra admits. However, nothing stops the dynamic that unfolds when the creative potential of the many is combined with expert knowledge and powerful motivation. The “good genie” of a common cause is out of the bottle.