by Christian Stafford

Seth Cooper, an Assistant Professor in Northeastern University’s College of Computer and Information Science (CCIS), is interested in building crowd-sourcing videogames that may be used for promoting research and helping to solve real-world problems. The app Foldit, which Cooper continues to collaborate on after helping out with its initial development, is a perfect example of crowdsourcing videogames.

“Foldit was my PhD thesis project at the University of Washington,” Cooper said. “It’s a game where players compete and collaborate to find well-folded protein structures,” he said.

Proteins are fundamental molecules for life to exist, Cooper said, and by understanding their structures, researchers can determine their functions and get an idea of how they operate inside of a cell.

“It is difficult to determine their structures, so Foldit [allows] players to help figure this out,” said Cooper. “A background in biochemistry is not required to play — it is a kind of multiplayer puzzle where the game shows players a representation of a protein and players can manipulate it to try to fit the pieces together in a compact shape,” he said.

The mechanics and concept of Foldit are not isolated to the study of protein structures and the way they fold – Cooper talked about other crowdsourcing projects similar to Foldit that are also helping to promote research.

“I have worked on other games where players build machines out of DNA or prove properties of software. Others have made games looking at reconstructing neurons (Eyewire), genomic sequence alignment (Phylo) and even mapping land use (Cropland Capture) or gathering text labels for images (ESP Game),” Cooper said.

Initially created during Cooper’s time at the University of Washington, Foldit continues to be developed by individuals at Northeastern University and other institutions. At Northeastern, Cooper and his colleagues are working on improving Foldit in several ways including adding multi-touch and mobile device interaction with proteins in order to improve the user experience.

“We are also working on ways for biochemists to use the Foldit interface for their own work, such as Foldit Standalone which lets scientists import and export their own structures into the Foldit interface and [provides] support to make it easier to post structures on the Foldit website for research or education,” said Cooper.

Northeastern is also working to improve the tutorial aspects of Foldit in order to make it easier to introduce the game to new players. CCIS PhD student Josh Miller is currently responsible for working on this improvement, Cooper said.

Miller, a neuroscience and computer science double major graduate of Colgate University and first-year PhD student at Northeastern said that although he has only been in the CCIS program for a short time, what he has learned in class, specifically in his Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) course, has already proved to be applicable to the work he is conducting on Foldit.

“HCI covered all of the principles of user experience and good design practices that I’m trying to implement in Foldit. Once you start to understand the sorts of designs that are intuitive to humans, bad design stands out much more,” Miller said. “It becomes obvious that mistakes you make when interacting with technology are the fault of the designer and not yours, so the burden rests on the creators to make something as user-friendly as possible.

According to Miller, that is exactly his goal with Foldit – making it more user-friendly, saying that this necessary step in maintaining the game will allow players to realize the pure fun of the game and that they will then, “truly enjoy contributing to science.”

Northeastern is always looking for collaborators to help out with projects, Cooper said, and individuals may contact him at scooper@ccs.neu.edu if they would like to lend a helping hand.