Join the hunt for the Higgs boson or help coordinate disaster relief with the Citizen Cyberscience Centre

CERN's Citizen Cyberscience Centre is looking for volunteers to participate in two new citizen science projects - one of which will help analyse research findings from the Large Hadron Collider's (LHC) search for the elusive Higgs boson, the second will ask the public to analyse imagery to help prepare maps to help humanitarian relief in the aftermath of a natural disaster.

The first project makes use of idle time on volunteers' PCs to bring them together to form a 'Volunteer Cloud' that can work as a 'virtual supercomputer' to allow scientists working at CERN to compare simulations of collisions between two beams of protons with real data from the four LHC experiments.

The second project uses data from space agencies and satellite operators around the world, to enable UNOSAT to produce maps for humanitarian applications such as damage assessment or monitoring deforestation. The project relies on 'volunteer thinking' where participants actively analyse imagery and their results are compared.

"From a development and humanitarian perspective, the potential of citizen-powered research is enormous", says Francesco Pisano, Manager of UNOSAT, " Participating in the Citizen Cyberscience Centre enables us to get new insights into the cutting edge of crowdsourcing technologies. There is no doubt that volunteers are playing an increasingly central role in dealing with crisis response, thanks to the Internet."

Visit LHC@home 2.0 to start getting involved with the Higgs boson project. or the UNOSAT website to participate in their various Community Mapping projects.

Find out more information about the Citizen Cyberscience Centre.