hi fellow hubs:<div><br></div><div>i figured i'd introduce myself, as cameron kindly recently added me to the crew, and i'm not sure whether i had the opportunity to meet everyone in person yet.</div><div><br></div>
<div>perhaps the most relevant bit of info prior to our conference call is that several months ago we began (with MUCH assistance), something called the <a href="http://openconnectomeproject.org/">Open Connectome Project</a> (OCP for short). the main motivating forces behind our efforts were to make state-of-the-art science accessible to anybody with computer access, regardless of knowledge, training, interest, etc. access means viewing, playing, and contributing. we've mostly focused thus far on electron microscopy (EM) connectome data, and we are equally (if not more) excited about MR connectome data.</div>
<div><br></div><div>in terms of the MR connectome data, we've made viewing the data trivially easy by building a back-end server and finding a front-end webapp (called <a href="http://fly.mpi-cbg.de/~saalfeld/catmaid/">CATMAID</a>), which is under active development by some good friends of ours (and we are helping out too). we also made downloading chunks of the data quite easy (provided links) and making uploading annotations easy as well. the point is that it is easy to process the data and share the results. because the data is so big, nobody could do it on his/her own. since inception (early march), we've gotten about 25,000 hits. we are currently gearing up to make an "EM connectome inference grand challenge" in which we will release some data with ground truth, some without, some goals, and some benchmarks for comparison (much like the ADHD stuff). this announcement will hopefully coincide with a (couple) publication(s) describing our efforts (both in the massive scientific databasing of 3d data and machine vision tasks), which we hope will bring more attention to the project, including the machine vision and pattern recognition communities (instead of only neruoscientists). </div>
<div><br></div><div>so, we are VERY excited about the possibility of making similar contributions in the MR connectome world. we've already begun processing and classifying both the 1000FCP data and the ADHD-200 data. we are also very excited about the opportunity of playing with the rest of the neuro bureau team, and learning more about your goals/interests. looking forward to speaking to you all soon....</div>
<div><br></div><div>much love,</div><div>joshua</div><div><br></div><div><br clear="all"><div><br></div><div>--</div>If it makes you feel better, please remember to consider humanity before doing stuff. Otherwise, please just have a nice day.<br>
<a href="http://openconnectomeproject.org" target="_blank">openconnectomeproject.org</a><br><br><br><br></div>