{"id":889,"date":"2018-04-03T15:27:28","date_gmt":"2018-04-03T15:27:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dev-design-lab.pantheonsite.io\/?p=889"},"modified":"2018-05-02T16:47:33","modified_gmt":"2018-05-02T16:47:33","slug":"trust-your-gut-vineet-pandey-and-team-win-first-prize-at-hde-conference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3lectrik.com\/designlab\/trust-your-gut-vineet-pandey-and-team-win-first-prize-at-hde-conference\/","title":{"rendered":"Trust your Gut: Vineet Pandey and Team win First Prize at HDE Conference"},"content":{"rendered":"

How much do we actually know about our gut microbiome? A lot more than we might think, and Gut Instinct is tapping into that. Led by UC San Diego PhD student\u00a0Vineet<\/span>\u00a0Pandey, the project was born when microbiome researchers and\u00a0Design Lab<\/a>\u00a0members thinking about similar research problems chanced upon a potential collaboration.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen my advisor, Scott [Klemmer], and Director of\u00a0Center for Microbiome Innovation<\/a>\u00a0at UC San Diego, Rob [Knight], shared a ride together in Fall 2015, they started chatting about Rob\u2019s research on the human microbiome and his Coursera class (https:\/\/www.coursera.org\/learn\/microbiome<\/a>) on the topic. Around the same time, Scott and I had been discussing how we could enable online learners to perform work that is personally meaningful for them but also useful to the world at large. Popular online classes operate at massive scale and with rich diversity; online learners put in thousands of hours of work every day,\u201d explains Pandey. \u201cBut we were still looking for a concrete domain in which we could try out these ideas. The shared ride gave us an answer to this question.\u201d<\/p>\n

Currently, the\u00a0American Gut Projec<\/a>t, run out of the Knight Lab, receives samples (stool, skin, oral, environmental, etc.) from citizen scientists all over the world, with the overall goal of building as comprehensive of a map of the human microbiome as possible-and making the database of microbiome sequences and associated host metadata freely available for anyone to explore.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis project is a specific domain in which we can test our ideas of learning and doing useful work. And this was also meaningful for the\u00a0Knight Lab<\/a>\u00a0with whom we are collaborating, because they were discussing ideas to enable people to provide insights from their lifestyle and help understand the gut microbiome data,\u201d says Pandey. \u201cSo it was just a really good match!\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Gut Instinct (http:\/\/gutinstinct.ucsd.edu\/info\/<\/a>) is an online system that encourages citizen scientists by teaching them about the gut microbiome and then having them reflect on their experiences and life stories to generate unique insights. On the site, users can pose and answer health-related questions. This sets up a dual-objective system: not only do users learn about the gut microbiome, but scientists also get a deeper look at people\u2019s insights and folk theories they may not be able to collect in a lab.<\/p>\n

\u201cQuestions and discussion raised by people on Gut Instinct are meaningful for researchers. People\u2019s insights about their own life, in other words, contextual insights, can help researchers understand their gut microbiome data and actually figure out if there are any novel correlations\u201d says Pandey. \u201cAs an extremely naive example, say someone adds a question about whether kombucha improves their bowel movements, maybe 100 people answer this question as \u2018Yes,\u201d and 50 people say \u2018No,\u201d then we can look at their gut microbiome data and figure out if people who said yes and no are actually quite distinct in terms of their gut microbiome. Moreover, people\u2019s discussion comments can provide more specific insights about what happens in their body.\u201d<\/p>\n

So far, there have been positive signals that Gut Instinct is a good platform for creating useful scientific questions. \u201cWhen a test group of people used an early version of Gut Instinct, we found that they raised interesting questions, many of which of which were similar to those in the American Gut Project survey,\u201d explains Pandey. \u201cPeople raised 29 questions, and 10 of those questions actually matched with the official American Gut survey, meaning that people were thinking of the same topics as leading microbiome investigators were.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though Gut Instinct can be thought of as a form of crowdsourcing, Pandey argues that it exceeds that definition. \u201cA lot of scientific work involving citizens asks people to actually look at say, their yard, and count the number of flowers that blossom in every season. Researchers then use that data to generate results about effects of say, climate on blooming\u201d says Pandey. \u201cPeople can do that, that\u2019s great, and it\u2019s been successful as well, but people can also go beyond and share their own personal insights which they are curious about which can be really helpful for scientists. And we think this can be really useful in a lot of domains where scientists need further insight to figure out what\u2019s going on.\u201d<\/p>\n

In terms of design, the team initially went through multiple ideas early on in the prototyping phase.<\/p>\n

\u201cInitially, we tried many ideas. For example, we thought it would make sense if people would actually chat with each other in real-time, as compared to asking and answering questions on a forum,\u201d says Pandey. \u201cAnd that was terrible because when people chat, they have open-ended discussions with a lot of noise – we needed to encourage people to think in more structured ways, Some people are also uncomfortable chatting about personal details, even anonymously on the internet, so a structured question-answer format seemed more suitable: people have control over what they wanted to discuss and researchers can make quick use of people\u2019s insights.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ultimately, the collaboration among all members is vital to the success of the project. While Knight and Klemmer were the originators of the project, Pandey has been the engine driving the original idea forward by creating the software with help from UC San Diego undergraduates Brian Soe and Chen Yang and Computer Science Masters student Tushar Koul. All of the work has been done in close collaboration with domain-experts from the Knight Lab: Embriette Hyde, project manager of the American Gut project, and post-doctoral research associates Amnon Amir, Tomasz Kosciolek, and Justine Debelius. Embriette\u2019s expertise with American Gut has been critical in bridging the gap between the Knight lab and the Design lab.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt every meeting between our two groups I show a prototype, which everyone can provide concrete feedback on or interact with, so that keeps things specific\u201d says Pandey.<\/p>\n

Gut Instinct has a clear plan for the upcoming months. \u201cWe want to work with participants who have certain ailments, like Inflammatory Bowel Disease, Type 1 Diabetes, and IBS, as well as individuals on the autism spectrum,\u201d says Pandey. \u201cWe hypothesize that these specific groups will have specific personal insights, and they will be highly motivated to act as citizen scientists.<\/p>\n

The final goal of Gut Instinct is to open it up to the public, which Pandey hopes to accomplish within the next 2 months. Hopefully, then, the project members, as well as the rest of the world, can get one step closer to decoding the gut microbiome.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Follow the Gut Instinct project on Social Media:<\/p>\n

Facebook<\/a><\/p>\n

Twitter<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How much do we actually know about our gut microbiome? A lot more than we might think, and Gut Instinct is tapping into that. Led by UC San Diego PhD student\u00a0Vineet\u00a0Pandey, the project was born when microbiome researchers and\u00a0Design Lab\u00a0members thinking about similar research problems chanced upon a potential collaboration. \u201cWhen my advisor, Scott [Klemmer],…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3394,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,43,3],"tags":[],"post_series":[],"class_list":["post-889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-healthcare","category-large-scale-learning","category-news","entry","has-media"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/3lectrik.com\/designlab\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/Vineet-Newsletter-Photos-3-of-3.jpg?fit=2241%2C2060&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3lectrik.com\/designlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3lectrik.com\/designlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3lectrik.com\/designlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3lectrik.com\/designlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3lectrik.com\/designlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=889"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/3lectrik.com\/designlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/889\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2683,"href":"https:\/\/3lectrik.com\/designlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/889\/revisions\/2683"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3lectrik.com\/designlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3394"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3lectrik.com\/designlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3lectrik.com\/designlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3lectrik.com\/designlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=889"},{"taxonomy":"post_series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3lectrik.com\/designlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_series?post=889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}