After the success of the 2019 initiative, Vodafone Foundation e Airc Foundation for cancer research join forces again with a project available on DreamLab, the app that transforms the smartphone into a valuable tool to accelerate research thanks to distributed computing.
This is a new citizen science project that follows the previous Genoma in 3d, conducted with the support of Airc at Ifom: it also joins the one launched last year by the Vodafone Foundation with Imperial College London to fight the coronavirus. The explorer of cancer cells (this is its name) aims to identify the cells most responsible for different types of tumors: each is filed and an identikit is traced for each to identify the most dangerous and then hit them.
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DreamLab, conceived and developed by the Vodafone Foundation, is the free app that allows anyone with a smartphone to contribute to medical research, even when sleeping: The computing power of smartphones, normally used for email, apps, streaming videos or music, and so on, is an unused resource at night. On the other hand, when the smartphone is unused and connected to the mains, DreamLab downloads small data packets and returns them to researchers once they are processed: distributed computing drastically reduces the time required for analyzing large amounts of information.
the budget
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In this project it is expected to use a total of about 2.4 million computing hours on mobile phones: if with a computer with an 8 core processor, active 24 hours a day, it would take about 12,500 days, with a network of only 1000 smartphones, activated for only 6 hours a night, the time required is reduced by about 30 times.
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