Student Competitions

Carnegie Mellon Hosts Neurohackathon

• By Leila Meyer
• 05/19/16

BrainHub, a multi-disciplinary research organization at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), is hosting its first Neurohackathon May 24-25. The event challenges computer science students to develop solutions for analyzing neuroscience data.

Researchers from BrainHub have collected vast amounts of data from MRI and electrophysiological recordings. "The brain has billions of neurons and trillions of synapses, making it an excellent source of big data," stated a news release from the university. Teams participating in the Neurohackathon will each receive a neuroscience dataset and work with resesarchers to develop new methods of analyzing the data, according to information from the university.

Neurohackathon projects include:

• Developing a supervised learning classifier to analyze human brain neuroanatomy from MRI images;
• Attempting to establish a relationship between neural activity and mouse behavior by analyzing fluorescent activity recorded while a mouse was running and at rest;
• Analyzing data on epigenetic changes in the human brain to identify any associations between those changes and various diseases; and
• Attempting to identify types of brain cells by analyzing their spontaneous firing patterns.

Each team will include at least one graduate student from CMU's School of Computer Science. Neurohackathon prizes include travel awards and a semester of graduate tuition.

BrainHub's Neurohackathon is sponsored by Qualcomm, Google, Microsoft, Baidu, CMU's Provost’s Office, BrainHub and CMU's Department of Machine Learning.