Opensystems-Universitat de Barcelona

Bringing science to the streets

OpenSystems is a multidisciplinary group of the University of Barcelona: we do science by mixing it with art and by public participation. We work together with many actors and build tailored-made research activities to address issues mainly related to urban living.

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What is citizen science?

It is the area in which amateur scientists or people with no science background or focus take part in scientific laboratories, experiments, and research projects.
We are fully committed to Citizen Science. Data science, complex systems science and social or socio-economic systems are our primary areas of expertise. Jointly with several schools, we co-design collective experiments to raise evidences to respond societal challenges and to publicly discuss results. Citizen science will also be the focus of our role in STEMFORYOUTH, where we will connect the 6 scientific disciplines with one another, and create a set of events, a competition and a final presentation of the most successful students who ran citizen science experiments in schools.

OPENSYSTEMS outside the lab

Studentgo!
Our Bee-Path project launched a mobile application to track people mobility around Barcelona, and later on it allowed them to find objects on their way by using the app for navigation. A mix of artists, biologists and scientists worked to make this experiment. The idea behind it is to obtain an automated analysis of the type of mobility done and to propose mathematical to explain the observed phenomena, so that, in the future, mobility in certain contexts could be predicted.

Bee sensitive

Urban bees are indicators of quality of the city where we live. Our Urban Bees project captures and decryptsthe information provided by bee. TO do this we place sensors outside and inside beehives made in the city. Sensors provide data such as temperature (internal and external), ambient noise (inside), the weight of the hive or the entrance and exit of the bees, that can be related to the health of the urban ecosystem that surrounds us.

Mind reading

We did a scientific experiment to study the behaviour of many volunteers in various terms, from individual psychology to patterns in the stock exchange business. Our results from "Doctor Brain, the crazy psychotherapist", were published on Nature Communications in 2014.

STAFF

  • Josep Perelló

    josep.perello@ub.edu
    Project leader / Scientific Coordinator
  • Isabelle Bonhoure

    Project Manager


  • Ignasi Labastida

    CRAI responsible and Creative
    Commons Spanish leader.