In collaboration with the Centre for Biodiversity Analysis, local tech start-up company QuestaGame has developed short-term internships to give students (and others) the opportunity to work with them. 

QuestaGame are looking for people who are passionate about the environment, analytical thinkers, and team-players with excellent communication skills. You should be outgoing, eager to learn new things, and comfortable working both online and amongst a team. QuestaGame appreciates innovative thinking and bravery. You should feel that everything you do is having a significant impact. Please read QuestaGame's values for more information.

These internships are an excellent opportunity for undergraduates, Honours or PhD students to use their science knowledge that will, in turn, provide unique experience outside academia in a local, highly awarded, start-up tech company. Several previous ANU interns are now valuable team members of QuestaGame.

QuestaGame will provide a desk in their Canberra office and meaningful, educational, intelligent, paid (and/or biocoin) work.

For more information, please contact QuestaGame co-founders Mallika and Andrew Robinson.

About QuestaGame

QuestaGame is a Canberra-based, now international, tech company that combines citizen science, biodiversity information economics and social gaming technologies to motivate and engage players to discover and learn about their local environments.

Players, competing individually or in 'clan' groups, use a mobile phone app to take photos of living things. A collective ‘bio-expertise engine’ (which includes expert taxonomists in museums and herbaria to respected amateur natural historians) then identifies the sightings and players win points based on taxa, rarity, etc.

These sightings ultimately become citizen science data as the geocoded images and IDs are uploaded into the Atlas of Living Australia and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility where they are freely available for research and management, eg. conservation, biosecurity.

Andrew Robinson, co-founder of QuestaGame, introduced QuestaGame to the CBA community at a seminar - QuestaGame: How a Multiplayer Mobile Game Can Raise the Value of Biodiversity Knowledge.

QuestaGame is also interested in the ethics of using public data, such as people's images of nature, to train AI algorithms, investigated in the workshop: Citizen science and biodiversity in the age of artificial intelligence (Oct 2017), and discussed further in The Conversation - AI is learning from our encounters with nature – and that’s a concern.