Team:SJTU-Software/Practices
"Human Practices is the study of how your work affects the world, and how the world affects your work."
— Peter Carr, Director of Judging
We devoted ourselves to the educational, public engagement and public perception activities. At the meantime we also did a lot in user survey to upgrading our software. According to those issues, we hope our project could benefit the public and attract more people to be involved in synthetic biology.
Public Engagement
Science and Technology exhibition in Shanghai Science and Technology Museum
On Aug 8th 2015, our team gave a science show of our project for the residents in Shanghai Science and Technology Museum by free to initiate people's interest in interdiscipline.
Mostly, people were attracted by our post; they would come by although the content is unfamiliar with them. It was our pleasure to introduce the basic knowledge to them. Of course, most of the questions were asked by the teenagers who seems to have more interest in the new science field.
After the whole day, we got tired but felt meaningful. There are too many people who don't know the basic conceptions of biology, and in the end, we told to the staff that our team were willing to participate this exhibition next year.
Conference in Taiwain
During July19th-23th 2015, we took part in an International Genetically Engineered Machine Conference held in National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. 5 of our team members went there to share our ideas with and offer advice to other teams most of which were from Asia. Jun Chen showed our project to all the others on July 22th, and we were offered many suggestions for updating our project, some of them were really useful.
In the end, Relationships were built with lots of teams, we also gained three teams to be our partners for further cooperation.
Newsletter in Xiamen University
In order to let more and more college student be aware about our project, BASE, as our project name, is published by the Newsletter in Xiamen University on July 28th,2015. We want those students studying in the university to notice the interdiscipline, that's what we mostly value. We believe that nowadays plenty of questions need to be solved by the cooperation from different fields. So our team makes the introduction of this conception as an important part of our human practice.
Assessing our project
Risk Assessment
We promise:
Our database is based on the IGEM official database which is opened for everyone, and our own database doesn’t come down to the tort.
The idea and software are original works, we never copy others work.
Feasibility Assessment
Why our software so competitive:
Our project reforms the database which is provided by the IGEM official website.
The algorithm is associated with the latest paper and the former experience. And it has been associated with lots of lab testification.
We did the User Survey (From the amateurs to the Professors)for three times to make sure the satisfaction and convenience of our project.
All the icon on UI is designed by ourselves from a researcher view, thus our project is more competitive than others.
End-User Considerations
Our software is aimed to the IGEMers and all the researchers who are interested in the synthetic biology.
It’s free
Web application
UI is designed user-friendly
Social Justice
We considered the underlying risk our project will have on the society. Especially the social justice.
Helping the Practice of Science and Engineering
Law and Regulation
During the scientific research and normal life, we all need to follow the law which ensure our safety and human rights. As a new field in science and tecnology, Synthetic Biology is full of challenage not only in academic research, but also for law and regulation.
Safety and Security
People in China started to realize the importance of the safety of bioengineering and synthetic biology these years.
Moreover, people mostly concern that synthetic biology could create artifical life which will break down moral principles and ethics. The terrorists could use scientific researching results to develop biology weapons or destory the environment. In a interview, the Professor Pei gave his answer to it, he says,
because the current research is in the early stages of development, scientists didn't have a lot of freedom to follow their ideas to manipulate the genome. Though small, potential biological safety problems cannot be ruled out.
I think the management of synthetic biology should keep a constant update. What’s more, the supervisory authority shall regulate their management and monitoring standards timely according to the technical development in this field. We need to absorb the lessons of GM research, timely communicate with the public so that they can better understand the techniques used in this research.
User survey
We did the User Survey to ensure our UI to be more user-freindly, our algorithm to be more veracity; our software to be more comlepeted.
First survey
Used by Igemers from other teams(SJTU-Biox-Shanghai,SYSU-China) and students in biology major in our university, we got some valuable advices; Some of them were pretty referential. The biggest problem is that our data is too little, thus we need to improve our database; Also, the score of a biobrick given by our evaluation system is quite weird.
Second survey
After asking professors in biology field and computer science field, we were advised to consider a complex condition which different user may have different thought about their ideal biobrick. So we added a new function for users to solve this problem. Also, in order to make our software user-friendly, our chief designer Zhangyue He communicated with lots of biology professor to optimize our UI from a researcher view.