[Neurobureau-hubs] hello hubs

[joshua vogelstein]

hi fellow hubs:

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.

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 Open
Connectome Project <http://openconnectomeproject.org/> (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.

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
CATMAID <http://fly.mpi-cbg.de/~saalfeld/catmaid/>), 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).

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....

much love,
joshua



--
If it makes you feel better, please remember to consider humanity before
doing stuff. Otherwise, please just have a nice day.
openconnectomeproject.org
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