Hacking the Neuro

I recently attended Neurohackweek, a week-long workshop + hackathon focusing on technologies relevant to brain imaging. It was a totally amazing experience. Despite initially feeling like I was way in over-my-head, I learned a ton of new things and (hopefully) helped others do the same. I’d highly recommend other folks check it out if they have the opportunity.

I worked as part of a multi-group project that (broadly speaking) was trying to integrate a fast and easy way to compare different machine-learning and data QA algorithms with a powerful cloud computing framework. My specific role was part of the algorithm development (“black box”) team to wrap some of the awesome functionality from existing machine-learning tools in python into simple, light-weight, intelligent, but configurable command-line analysis programs. That way, these programs could be rapidly slotted into a larger computing framework with minimal interaction from a user.

Here’s a really quick talk I gave on the final day of the week, briefly explaining what we managed to accomplish: