What is Reddit's opinion of CrowdMag?

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It's not BOINC related (still volunteer computing), but I believe this Cosmic Ray project may still be active. : https://crayfis.io/

There is also CrowdMag : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=gov.noaa.ngdc.wmm2

This app measures magnetic field and display the data as graph or map in units of nanotesla (nT; one nanotesla equals 10^−9 tesla). Displays Z (downward component), H (horizontal intensity) and F (total intensity) of the local magnetic field vector. Data processing reduces the noise in the data to about 1% of the actual magnetic field. We rotate the magnetic data from the phone’s orientation to the real-world coordinates. Use it for recording magnetic data at a location or over an area. Export your data as a CSV file. Optionally, enable background reporting to help NOAA scientists understand more about the Earth’s magnetic field!

This is one of the most exciting developments in the sensor crowdsourcing world in a while. These researchers have been working on this for years and have made an Android app that uses the accelerometer to train a neural network. The neural network will soon be able to detect earthquakes happening in real-time as millions of phones report in their sensor data. And what's amazing is that this can be done without any significant loss to battery life!

I've been thinking about this concept for years, since it's one of the most useful and valuable things you can do with the automatic crowdsourcing of smartphone sensor data. This is the kind of thing that everyone images when talking about the ill-named "Internet of Things" - but this is one of the early developments that show how powerful IoT could be. Smart devices all aware of their environment and collaborating with each other to create useful datasets that benefit entire countries' populations.

There are lots of things that we could crowdsource from sensors in smartphones just like this. Of course there's barometer data, along with humidity and temperature data, that we can use in weather forecasts. There's also microphone data that is being used by other researchers to learn about noise pollution in cities. And magnetic field sensors in smartphones can be used to build a live, global map of the Earth's magnetic field. And there's probably a whole set of interesting scientific applications in crowdsourcing data from every new sensor that gets added! Smartphones are getting an average of about 1 new sensor per year, that's been going on for like 10 years now. The proliferation of sensors in smartphones is kind of like Moore's law with the exponential part: but merely a linear increase in the environmental sensing capabilities produces enormous new opportunities for scientific discovery.

What's missing from all of this is a unified, open source framework for the automatic crowdsourcing of sensor data from smartphones. It pains me that everybody has to keep reinventing their own system for this, some of them are closed and proprietary, some of them are open, but they're all a replication of what should be a very basic task.

We need a single, open source framework for this. Every researcher should be able to just plug-and-play a mobile SDK for iPhone and Android and just select "Sensor X, Y at intervals of Z minutes, to server A. Research teams B and C subscribe to the data feed". That would be a revolutionary thing to build because it would open up so much more valuable research by making it second-nature to create massive new datasets in realtime.