Who am I?

Dear Steemit users,

over the last couple of month's, I have been a quiet lurker on steem and reading articles, getting familiar with the steem concepts and in general, benefiting from this amazing resource. This leads to the question, how can I use steemit to benefit me, our company and the community the most?

Hence today, I would like to officially introduce my self.

Who am I?

The last 18 years I spend working in educational research, writing enterprise level software for educational purposes. As a language of choice, I tend to use Java and Scala. Mixed in with a sprinkle of python and some web design to round things off.
Basically, I love coding, software design and scientific research. When I'm not working, you will find me at home spending time with my adorable family and be doing one of my excessive amount of hobbies, according to my wife, which contain woodwork, metalwork, beer brewing, reading, playing computer games or enjoying the California countryside.

Scientific data curation

During my years as software developer, I wrote a couple of different database and data processing systems and want to take the opportunity to quickly outline some problems I encountered doing so.

In 2001, I wrote an open source GCMS data processing system, which has been under content development since. The main goal of this software is to automatically annotate unknown compounds in GCMS data analysis. After 17 years, we are still seeing conditions, where our algorithm fails and we need to do better.
The main challenge is always correcting against external factors, which greatly affect the results. Examples for this would be retention time shifts, which can be fixed by using retention index based correction algorithms, which can fail depending on conditions. Like a person forgetting to introduce the actual markers in the sample. So the algorithm actually didn't fail in this case, a manual task failed instead.

It would be great to have some form of a system, which can easily allow us to review the results of this software and leave feedback if the annotation were correct or wrong and add supporting comments.

After merging data of this system with metadata, acquired over the last ~18 years we can now get insight into the abundance of chemicals in different biological species. For example, you can look at glutamine. The data for this chemical compound was acquired from several different species, which were entered by several different people. People make mistakes. It would be great if there would be some system to provide feedback for this kind of data and gives people a chance to say that there is a spelling error for this record.

Fake news

I love reading, I really do and according to my wife I'm easily able to spend a whole night reading online articles and totally forgot to sleep, but that's what coffee is for...

But during the past couple of years, I keep noticing (as do a lot of other people) the promotion of fake news everywhere. This mostly seemed to start with the presidential elections in the United States of America.
Currently, It's nearly impossible to know what can you trust and what can't you trust. We are just flooded by endless amounts of news, on the social network, news aggregators, and other sources.
Which begs the question, is it smart to believe news from the social network? Or would it be better to rate them somehow, based on a consensus model of people? And no a like or dislike button is not expressive enough. I think we can do better.
Again it would be great to have a tool to help us with this.

which brings us to the last section...

Isaac

Isaac was founded as a company and software solution to collect and review data while rewarding the person to do so. We have seen many examples of great review platforms over the years. Be it yelp, Amazon reviews or even the social network like buttons. After all, we all get excited if something we post gets a lot of 'likes'.
But none actually reward you or judge you how good the actual content is. We all know about the unhappy customer, who had to wait in line for 20 minutes at a restaurant or the person who got coffee spiled over them by a waitress, who might leave a bad review just based on this. Which is not always at fault of the restaurant We also would like to reward you, for going out of the way to put in the effort to leave the actual review.

We really hope to revamp some of these approaches people use these days to leave reviews and evaluate user-driven content while benefiting from the possibilities of the blockchain technologies.

In short, you could describe Isaac as:

Isaac is an evaluation and reward platform for crowdsourcing reviews and providing impartial ratings for online content

And we are really excited about it, so much actually that we decided to submit it to the Stellar Build Challenge today. If you are curious to find more out about Isaac, please check out our website or our blog, hosted on steemit.

Thank you for your time!