Exploring the Mind with the Aid of Personal Genome — Citizen Science Genetics to Promote Positive Well-Being

Understanding the human mind and increasing individual happiness are important goals in artificial intelligence (AI) and well-being science. The recent revolution in portable self-tracking devices in the data-driven wellness movement and participatory-driven wellness communities, such as the Quantified Self community, provides us with new opportunities to collect psychological or physiological data for understanding the human mind.  While new technologies make it possible to track our daily behavior and various biological signals such as physiological or genetic data more easily, one of the important remaining challenges is to discover our own truly meaningful personal values. Citizen science, scientific research by crowdsourcing or human-based computation, is a new and challenging framework that promotes interdisciplinary research in the fields of computer science, life/brain science, and social psychological/behavioral science, which may introduce new paradigms to the AI community. We have been working on citizen science projects related to the area of personal genomics and have developed a personal genomics information environment named MyFinder. The developed platform supports the search for our inherited talents and maximizes our potential for a meaningful life. In particular, we are interested in the human mind and the personal genome. In this paper, we introduce our MyFinder Project and present the results of a recent study on “social intelligence genomics and empathy building”, and discuss issues involved in exploring our mind within the context of personal genomics.