Science Hack Day will be returning to San Francisco in 2013!

Where: California Academy of Sciences
When: September 28-29, 2013

Registration will open up sometime in August. Stay tuned to @sciencehackday for updates!

It’s been two weeks since the third San Francisco edition of Science Hack Day and visions of particle collisions are still dancing in my head. 150 science hackers came together over the weekend to create brilliant mashups of imagination and mischief. Even more than all the delightful hacks that emerge over the 24 consecutive hours, I absolutely love the people that make up Science Hack Day each year. Now on our third year, the beginning of the event has become such a joyous occasion – veteran science hackers hug each other, many not having had a chance to see one another since the previous year; newcomers quickly strike up conversations with one another over percolating ideas. What excites me the most are the potential serendipitous sparks that may ignite by having such a diverse group of people in the same place. No other event that I know of can bring together U.S. coastguards, fashion designers, environmental lawyers, particle physicists, futurists,  novelists, watercolorists,  molecular biologists, high school students, and roboticists to see what they can prototype, together, in 24 consecutive hours. People flew in from as far as Kenya and Ireland to attend (keep an eye out for Science Hack Day Nairobi & Science Hack Day Dublin in 2013!).

A particle physicist shows off some dark matter maps, photo by Matt Biddulph

Photos + Videos
Matt Biddulph created a lovely set of photos on Flickr for your browsing pleasure. Mitch Altman also has a fun set of photos to check out. Both are released under a Creative Commons license. You can also search for “sciencehackday” on Flickr to find many more taken by some of the attendees. We also added a timelapse of the event on YouTube.

Hacking a robot, photo by Matt Biddulph

The Hacks
You can browse through all 19 hacks that were created over the weekend on the wiki.  Eight teams were awarded the coveted Science Hack Day gold medals for Best In Show, People’s Choice, the Design Award, the Hardware Award, the Data Award, the Wacky Award, the Curiosity Award and the Replicability Award.

The Reactions
The stories that are shared with us after Science Hack Day are always fascinating. Here’s just a few of the reactions we’ve heard so far:

“When the teams get together to show off their hacks, they’re all in various stages of incompletion. They’re ideas to build on, exercises in learning and collaboration, and mostly, just a lot of fun.” – Nathan Hurst, Wired

“I went to last year’s event as well and was super impressed with the many awesome projects that came out of the weekend – this year was no let down, either!” – Sean Herron, NASA

“It’s a mix of familiar maker faces along with professional and citizen scientists. The agenda for the two-day event looks to span all areas of science–hacking data, the Large Hadron Collider,  building your own space experiment, DIY bio, and hacking geology.” – David Lang, Make

“The idea quickly became about more than doing cool things with science data, and turned into an exploration of a broader question: Could a hack day bring together scientists, technologists, and designers — three groups that have traditionally been a bit wary of each other — and get them to learn from each other and collaborate?” – Eliza Kern, GigaOm

“Have to say, I can’t wait until next #sciencehackday! That was so much fun.” – C. Alaric Moore

“#ScienceHackDay was epic!!! loved our awesome @geomappit team, learned *so many* new things … !” – Lisa Ballard, SETI Institute

“Building a fruit electrophoresis gel or a Higgs boson dance game at #ScienceHackDay? I don’t know what to choose…” – Aurelie Coulon, swissnex sf

“Does @sciencehackdaycount as entertainment? The demos in SF today were both clever and hilarious.http://sciencehackday.com” – Sharon Wong

“This was, honestly, the first time since college that I’ve felt like I was back in school, working together with a bunch of bright people on exciting things. What a wonderful feeling!” – Yevgeny Binder

Contemplating hacks, photo by Matt Biddulph

Next Year
As we announced at Science Hack Day, we are excited to have our next year’s event already lined up! Science Hack Day SF 2013 will be held at the California Academy of Sciences on September 28-29. Each year, we’ve been fortunate enough to have amazing venues support the event (from Institute For The Future, to Brightworks, to Hot Studio), and 2013 will continue that trend. We’re especially excited about being able to spend the night at California Academy of Sciences – what an amazing place to run around in during all hours of the night!

Packed house for learning about visualizing science by Cal Academy’s planetarium director, photo by Matt Biddulph

Thank You
Science Hack Day is created by the people, for the people. The event organically self-organizes throughout the weekend thanks to all the attendees who get excited and make things with science! Thanks to everyone who was able to attend and we hope to see you again in 2013!

A huge thank you to the co-organizers (Ariel, Ian, Matt & Nic) and all our friends for volunteering their time throughout the year and during the event: Chris, David, Erin, Jessy, Kishore, Mathias, Paul, Rose, Tantek and many others.

Lastly, thank you to all our sponsors who help keep this a completely free event for everyone to attend. Their contributions help make sure everyone has enough food, shelter, internet and awesomeness to keep going throughout the weekend. Thanks to Hot Studio, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, GitHub, Institute For The Future, Mendeley, swissnex San Francisco, PLOS, and Carol Mayer Marshall (my own grandmother!).

– Ariel Waldman, Science Hack Day SF organizer

Save the date! Science Hack Day is coming back to San Francisco for 2012 (our third year)! Here are the details:

When: November 3-4, 2012
Where: Hot Studio, 585 Howard Street (at 2nd St.), San Francisco

We’ll open up registration in September, so stay tuned to @sciencehackday on Twitter. In case you missed it, here’s what Science Hack Day SF was like last year.

We’re now looking for sponsors – please email ariel@sciencehackday.org if you’re interested in supporting this super awesome event!

It’s been a little over a week since the second Science Hack Day SF took place at Brightworks. The event this year was an even larger success – hosting 150 science hackers from the local area and countries around the world, including: Brazil, Canada, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, and South Africa. The awesomeness of the people and the hacks that come together via Science Hack Day is difficult to put into words, but here are a few: overwhelming, unexpected, joyful, serendipitous, amazing and fun.

The event kicked off with a variety of lightning talks around data, tools and ideas to consider using throughout the weekend. The talks covered a wide variety of scientific exploration: NASA data, cognitive science experiments, DIY underwater exploration, citizen science data, geophysical gadgets, science tinkering for kids, DIYbio endeavors, data visualization, and data from the Large Hadron Collider.

The science hacking went straight through Saturday morning into Sunday – many hacking until 4am and a few working through the night with no sleep (check out the time-lapse video of the event!). Sunday afternoon, at 13:37, all hands were ordered off keyboards and robots, as hacking officially ended and demos began. The result of 24 consecutive hours of tinkering was 26 different hacks across a very wide spectrum of science.

The hacks

Browse the entire list of hacks from Science Hack Day SF 2011 or watch a video of the hack demos. We awarded engraved SCIENCE medals to the winning teams of 6 competition categories:

People’s Choice: Syneseizure!

(photo by Matt Biddulph)
From the team: “Synesthesia is a condition in which one sensation (sight, hearing, etc) gets mixed up with another. This can cause situations in which someone “smells” sounds, or “sees” touches. For this hack, we designed and built a full head mask that allows the wearer to feel images in real time. The mask is arrayed with 12 speakers that contact the skin of the face. When an image is captured with a webcam and converted into a 12 pixel black-and-white representation. The computer activates arduinos that control the speakers. If the pixel is white, the corresponding speaker is turned on. If the pixel is black, the corresponding speaker is turned off. This allows the wearer to feel (via the vibrations of the speakers) on their face.”
More on the hack can be found at: http://syneseizure.wordpress.com/ and a video of the demo at: http://youtube.com/watch?v=BhmfGMqn-8o

Best In Show: DNAquiri

(photo by Matt Biddulph)
From the team: “We developed a DNA extraction protocol, the product of which also happens to be a tasty cocktail. Fruit cells (strawberry and others) are lysed by freeze/thaw and heat cycles to eliminate the use of surfactants. Salt is minimized and sugar added in order to mask any salty flavor. Bacardi 151 is layered over fruit purée to extract DNA into the ethanol phase. A tiny umbrella completes the tropical vibe.”
Check out how to do-it-yourself at: http://instructables.com/id/DNAquiri-the-delicious-DNA-extraction/

The Data Award: EpiCell

From the team: “Background: Disease is prevalent but healthcare is not. However, much of the world now has access to a cell phone. Technologies are being developed that can turn cell phones into diagnostic devices. These devices can be used at the point of care and the information can be transmitted in real-time to experts and databases. If properly deployed and used, mobile diagnostic devices could facilitate addressing the needs of individuals in impoverished areas and tracking the emergence of disease outbreaks. Hack: To determine where such devices should be deployed, we collected open source geospatial data and created a map to identify locations where healthcare was scarce, but cell phone coverage was readily available.”
See the hack in action: http://epicell.github.com/

The Brightworks Hardware Award: ISS Globe

(photo by Matt Biddulph)
From the team: “The position of the International Space Station in real time drawn on a physical globe with a laser pointer. We took an vintage globe and two hobby servos and a laser and mounted the laser on the inside of the [translucent] globe such that the laser could be pointed at any point on Earth. Firmware was written as an interface between the servos and a laptop. A python client was written to talk to the microcontroller (a teensy) controlling the servos and place the laser dot on Earth where the ISS is in real time.”
View the ISS Globe in action: http://yfrog.com/h74c0qjj

The Design Award: Isodrag Typeface

(photo by Matt Biddulph)
From the team: “Most typefaces look for visual consistency in their design but what about physical consistency? In this hack, the aerodynamic properties of letters were determined in a home-made wind tunnel experiment and then those letters were rescaled so that all letter have approximately the same aerodynamic drag. For example, the letter “I” has low aerodynamic drag normally so it becomes much thicker in the isodrag typeface. Conversely, “W” has significant drag so it becomes thinner than usual.”
View the resulting typeface: http://twitpic.com/7dpbrd

The DTRA Government Award: Quake Canary “PEEPS”

(photo by Satoka F.)
From the team: “Basically, the concept is: 1) We’re using accelerometer data from arduinos and iphones and geophones to act as a notification of an earthquake. 2) We collect this publically-contributed seismic data and publish it to a online map using openheatmap.com. 3) We compare with USGS and other seismic data available to the public in real time – also added to our map. 4) We notify users of a recent or pending earthquake using an iphone app.”

More coverage

• Tweets from #sciencehackday
• Photos from the event by Matt Biddulph, Ariel Waldman, Brightworks, and Satoka
• Extensive summary by the great OpenGov team at NASA who hacked the weekend away
• An attendee’s experience who was part of the Syneseizure hack team

Many thanks

Science Hack Day is only made possible thanks to each uniquely awesome person that attends – so first and foremost, thank you to everyone who attended and created such an open, welcoming and collaborative community. Additional thanks to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation that awarded a grant allowing 10 people from around the world who are interested in organizing a Science Hack Day in their city to attend Science Hack Day SF.

Many thanks to our amazing sponsors who help keep the event completely free to attend and support the sheltering and nourishment for all our hackers. We encourage you to learn more about each of the sponsors at their following links:
Nobelists: Brightworks, Defense Threat Reduction Agency
Fellows: GitHub, Bay Area Science Festival, Galleria Park Hotel, CartoDB, Mendeley
Scholars: swissnex san francisco, Public Library of Science, Mozilla WebFWD, Silicon Valley Space Center

More thanks to the Science Hack Day SF co-organizing team who help advise and coordinate the event with me throughout the year: Arfon Smith, Ariel Waldman, David Harris, Ed Gutman, Eri Gentry, Ian Fung, Jeremy Keith, Jessy Schingler, Kirsten “Dr. Kiki” Sanford, Kishore Hari, Mathias Crawford, Matt Biddulph, Matt Hancher, Matt Wood, Paul Mison and Tantek Çelik. We all volunteer our time for several months out of the year to help make the 48 hours of Science Hack Day as awesome as possible.

- Ariel Waldman, Science Hack Day SF lead organizer

We’ve opened up the first wave of tickets! It’s free to attend, but since we have a capacity of 200, we’ll want to ask about your interest in the event. Please only register if you are able to be hacking at Science Hack Day for both days (Nov 12+13). No drop-ins.

Here’s links to everything you need to know for now:
• What is Science Hack Day anyway? Who is this for? (just to be clear: you don’t need to have experience with hacking or science-related things to attend – just an excitement for experimenting with it!)
• Where, When, Hotels, Tools at the venue
•  Hack Ideas, APIs + Datasets (please start adding any rough ideas to these pages ASAP!)
•  Updates on Science Hack Day: follow @sciencehackday

We’re also super excited about our confirmed sponsors: Brightworks, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, GitHub, Bay Area Science Festival, Galleria Park Hotel, CartoDB, Mendeley, swissnex san francisco, Public Library of Science, Mozilla WebFWD and Silicon Valley Space Center. 

There are of course a lot more details to be announced (pre-Science-Hack-Day-attendee-meetup, competition categories, prizes for best hacks, etc.), so stay tuned! If you have any questions for now, contact ariel@sciencehackday.org.

Lastly, I again assembled an amazingly super awesome team of science and technology people who are helping co-organize the event: Arfon Smith, myself - Ariel Waldman, David Harris, Ed Gutman, Eri Gentry, Ian Fung, Jeremy Keith, Jessy Schingler, Kirsten “Dr. Kiki” Sanford, Kishore Hari, Mathias Crawford, Matt Hancher, Matt Wood, Paul Mison and Tantek Çelik.

Get brainstorming!

- Ariel Waldman

Planning for Science Hack Day SF 2011 kicked off a little over a week ago. We’re very much in the early stages, so keep posted for more information by following @sciencehackday on Twitter.

Interested in sponsoring Science Hack Day?
Download our sponsorship prospectus and email ariel@sciencehackday.org!

photo by Gretchen Curtis

It has been roughly 2 weeks since the event concluded and we’re just now catching our breath from the overwhelming success! The full weekend of science hacking was nothing short of inspirational awesomeness – provided by the approximately 100 science hackers who descended upon Institute For The Future for the first Science Hack Day SF.

From sonifying particle collision data from accelerator labs to Android-powered spectrograph robots, a full spectrum of hardware and software hacks were created. Hacking began around lunch time on Saturday (after a great FooCamp-style 3-tag intro of everyone in attendance) and all hands were ordered to be off keyboards at 13:37 the following day. IFTF was a wonderful host that allowed everyone to continue hacking throughout the entire night. I heard the Science Walk project team (a hack for mashing up science education with geonotes) was outside doing GPS testing at 2am, and several people were hacking non-stop into the early daylight hours.

photo by Jeremy Keith

The full list of demoed hacks is on the wiki. The demos of what people made in 24 hours were really fun and inspiring – a full range of different and non-traditional ways of solving problems, creating new ideas and communicating data. We also requested for each team to create an infographic (with optional artistic assistance from one of our attendees!) representing the “big idea” behind their hack – they’re quite delightful artifacts to browse through.

Congratulations goes out to the prize winners who were reviewed across 5 categories (Best Design, Science Geek, Best Physical Hack, Best Use of Data, and People’s Choice) by our lovely panel of judges. Best Design went out to Fancy Pigeons, a prototype of a fun game aimed at teaching players about genetics. The Science Geek award went to Android Participatory Exploration, a hack combining a low-cost spectrograph with an Android-based robot. Best Physical Hack went to Grassroots Aerial Mapping, a project that explored the outdoors by strapping a camera to high-altitude balloons to create unique, stitched-together aerial maps. Winning both the Best Use of Data and People’s Choice award was Particle Wind Chime, a hack that took particle collision data from accelerator laboratories and mapped it across various sounds. This made for a particularly cool aural experience that could someday be used as a diagnostic tool for scientists; it additionally inspired a late night meta hack for visualizing the sounds. A big thanks to our prize donors: MakerBot, Dr. Kiki, MAKE, SFMOMA, California Academy of Sciences, TechShop and NASA!

photo by Gretchen Curtis

The diversity of hacks across different mediums and scientific subject areas were no doubt influenced by the diverse group of science hackers that attended. Based on our sign-up data, the rough breakdown of attendees was 33% female/66% male, with 33% developers, 20% scientists, 20% designers, and the remaining 27% were an awesome mashup of everything from robotic engineers to community managers and beyond (note: this data does *not* account for people with hybrid skills).

The event concluded with Chris Gerty from NASA and Lindsay Eyink from Apple rounding most of us up to run outside and watch the International Space Station fly over us. It definitely felt like the proper way to end such a momentous weekend.

A list of coverage around Science Hack Day is being kept at the bottom of the wiki. The event was covered by the BBC’s Science In Action radio show (starting at 20:57) and there was a great write-up on the Yahoo! Developer Network blog yesterday. You can also check out all the photos by searching for the scihack tag on Flickr. Dr. Kiki and Erik Lanigan took an *extensive* amount of video at Science Hack Day SF that they are aiming to slowly release over the coming weeks/months – so keep an eye out for updates from @sciencehackday on Twitter!

Last and most importantly, I have a TON of thank you’s to give!
- Thank you to our sponsors: Institute For The Future, Amazon Web Services, Hot Studio, Yahoo! Developer Network, swissnex san francisco, TechShop, Mendeley, and Pasta Q. You helped make this amazing weekend happen without a hitch! All science hackers were well fed, sheltered, tool-equipped and full of inspiration thanks to you!

- A huge heartfelt thank you to my co-organizing team: Arfon Smith, Amber Case, Ben Ward, David Harris, Ed Gutman, Eri Gentry, Ian Fung, Jeremy Keith, Jessy Cowan-Sharp, Kirsten “Dr. Kiki” Sanford, Kishore Hari, Mathias Crawford, Matt Hancher, Matt Wood and Tantek Çelik. Together, we spent 4 months organizing Science Hack Day SF – each person bringing a unique perspective and experience to the table. These people are utterly awesome and I’m already missing having our Sunday organizing meetings that most of us came in person or Skyped-in for!

- And of course, a massive thank you to each and every one of you who attended Science Hack Day SF! Each of you made the event the resourceful, fun and comfortable environment that it was by hacking, helping others, coming up with ideas, offering to help clean, giving talks, making friends, and learning about new things!

- Ariel Waldman, Science Hack Day SF lead organizer

The Science Hack Day SF organizing team is hard at work nailing down last minute details. This week, we’re on the hunt for fun prizes for our 6 competition categories. Interested in donating a cool prize for a great science hack or sponsoring multiple prizes? Get in touch!

A huge thanks goes out to our awesome sponsors so far:

• Institute For The Future has graciously donated their office as the venue for our weekend of science hacking!

• Amazon Web Services is donating $25 coupons to each attendee to help provide server space and storage for science hacks.

• Hot Studio is helping sponsor the weekend and a “best design” competition category, highlighting the significance of design in science.

• Yahoo! Developer Network is helping sponsor the weekend and will be at the event to help various teams/hacks.

• swissnex san francisco is sponsoring the after party – when hacking concludes and demos begin, we’ll be breaking out snacks and drinks to kickback from an intense weekend!

• TechShop is providing a bunch of great tools for everyone to use during the weekend – they’re also sponsoring some great prizes: a 1 month membership and 3 class coupons to TechShop!

• Mendeley is helping sponsor the weekend and a Mendeley API competition category.

• Pasta Q is sponsoring Saturday night’s dinner for all attendees!

See everyone in 2 weeks!

If you are interested in hacking at Science Hack Day for both days (Nov 13+14), then sign up here!
(10/27 update: Registration for Science Hack Day SF is now closed. Email ariel@arielwaldman.com if you’d like to be added to a waitlist.)

I’m also super excited to announce our initial confirmed sponsors!

Nobelist sponsors:

• Institute For The Future
• Amazon Web Services
• Hot Studio
• Yahoo! Developer Network

Scholar sponsors:

• TechShop, Inc.
• swissnex san francisco
• Mendeley
• Pasta Q

Have questions about Science Hack Day SF or interested in sponsoring? Email ariel@arielwaldman.com!

Who is Science Hack Day for?
Imagine a Venn diagram showing the intersection of web geeks and science geeks …that’s a pretty big intersection. Science Hack Day is for anyone with an interest in bringing science and technology together (from dabbling with APIs/datasets/interface design to biotech experiments and prototyping near-space payloads). If you’re a coder, designer, scientist, citizen scientist, hacker or just an enthusiastic person with good ideas, Science Hack Day is for you.

What’s a Hack Day?
A Hack Day is an event that brings together various types of geeks in the same physical space for a brief but intense period of collaboration, hacking, and creating awesome things. A hack is a quick solution to a problem – maybe not the most elegant solution, but often the cleverest (e.g. mashing up APIs, datasets and web interfaces from different sources in new and interesting ways).  A Hack Day is usually 48 hours long and involves a sleepover …although not much sleeping happens when everyone is either hacking or playing Werewolf. Some Hack Days have a specific focus. There have already been very successful Music Hack Days and Government Hack Days. It’s time for a Hack Day focused on Science! The mission of Science Hack Day is to get excited and make things with science*!

Give me the data already!
• When: November 13-14, 2010
• Where: Institute For The Future (124 University Ave, Palo Alto, CA, 94301 – 2 min. walk from Caltrain)
• Schedule
• Hack Ideas, APIs + Datasets (feel free to start adding to these pages whether or not you can attend!)
• Updates: follow @sciencehackday and/or subscribe to the wiki
• URLs: http://sf.sciencehackday.com + http://sciencehackday.pbworks.com/SF

How do I register to attend?
This week, we’re collaborating with scientists, technologists and designers that will help seed the event with example ideas and raw stuff to hack on. On October 1st September 29, we’ll open up the first wave of tickets (it’s free to attend, but since we have a capacity of 100, we’ll want to ask about your interest in the event). Sign up using your email address here to receive an email once we open up the registration process.

There are of course a lot more details to be announced (sponsors, competition categories and prizes for best hacks, etc.), so stay tuned! Any questions, interested in sponsoring or want to get in touch with us about Science Hack Day? Send emails to ariel@arielwaldman.com.

Lastly, I assembled an amazingly super awesome team (16 strong!) of science and technology people who are helping co-organize the event: Arfon Smith (Galaxy Zoo), myself – Ariel Waldman (Spacehack.org), Amber Case (CyborgCamp), Ben Ward (Yahoo! Developer Network), David Harris (Symmetry Magazine), Ed Gutman (Twitter), Eri Gentry (BioCurious), Ian Fung (UserVoice), Jeremy Keith (Clearleft), Jessy Cowan-Sharp (UMD), Kirsten “Dr. Kiki” Sanford (This Week In Science), Kishore Hari (UCSF), Mathias Crawford (Institute For The Future), Matt Hancher (Google), Matt Wood (Amazon Web Services), Tantek Çelik (Microformats.org + Mozilla). You can follow all of us on Twitter here!

Get brainstorming!

- Ariel Waldman

(* just to be clear: you don’t need to have experience with hacking on science-related things to attend – just an excitement for experimenting with it!)