How to cure a disease with your smartphone

New volunteers

David Anderson, University of California (Berkeley).

The launch of Android apps should extend the appeal of altruistic volunteer computing projects beyond its older demographic.

New economies might yield some more volunteers. BOINC is most popular in Western countries - especially cold ones such as in Scandinavia (“a computer can be a very effective heater of space”, Anderson noted), but the idea of volunteering is not as familiar in places like China, where people have a natural paranoia about their government.

Anderson is working on a project called CAS@Home with the Chinese Academy of Science in Beijing, running several science applications that he hopes might catch on.

The missing link is how to have these projects appeal beyond the overclockers and retired rocket scientists. There is a huge generation of users that don’t feel the need to ever tamper with their device. They own an iPhone.

“Everybody asks about iOS apps,” Anderson said, anticipating the question. “But there are a couple of big barriers.

“First, iOS is sufficiently different from Unix, so we’d have to rewrite a big chunk of BOINC to make it work.

“But more important than that - iOS is a closed and monopolistic system. If you want to release a program, you can only do it through Apple App Store. There is a long list of rules for what Apple would consider - and they explicitly disallow programs that download and run other applications.”

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