Allen Institute Data Enables Hackathon For the Human Brain

Nerval's Lobster writes "Hackathons are not exactly uncommon things, whether the programmers are assembled to improve a company product or simply to tackle a particular challenge. Few of them, however, offer the chance to hack the human brain. That was the reason behind the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Brain Science's week-long hackathon: give 30 participants from various universities and institutes, along with a smattering of technology companies, the chance to develop data-analysis tools based on the latest version of the Institute's Allen Brain Atlas API, which was released earlier in June. Projects and applications included that crunched a list of genes to discover disease patterns. Another translated genomic data into music—because when it comes to data-crunching and neuroscience, you can't be deadly serious all the time." Be careful what you wish for, though, in applying AI to regular I: New submitter jontyl writes of a project led by Google's Dr Jeff Dean which used a "16,000 processor array to create a brain-style 'neural network' with more than a billion connections." Says the article: "There's a certain grim inevitability to the fact that the YouTube company's creation began watching stills from cat videos."

Comments

Wrong word

[frisket]

For a moment I thought that said "Alien Institute..."

Re:Wrong word

[Ed_1024]

Yeah, me too! The letter pairings li and ll look pretty similar in the font I've got, plus I suppose my brain was hoping for "Alien"...

I applaud the merger between Slashdot and TheOnion

[Tyrannicsupremacy]

I initially misread the title of this article as "Alien institute data enables hacking the human brain."

Fantasy vs Reality

[A10Mechanic]

What we wished for - SKYNET. What we actually got - LOLcat

Re:Fantasy vs Reality

[Qzukk]

Combine them both and you get Ceiling Cat. Where is your god now, indeed.

Not enough time

[Anonymous Coward]

One week to analyze petabytes of information is absurdly brief. Just to transfer two petabytes in one week requires a data rate of 3550 Megabytes/sec. A somewhat sane amount of time for this would be to analyze the data for an entire summer. Otherwise, they're only working with a small subset of the data - possibly not enough to be statistically significant. Bringing 30 people to task for this for one week is like trying to make a baby in one month by using 9 women. It could be fun to try, but it just isn't going to happen.

AI is a scam

[Okian Warrior]

...a project led by Google's Dr Jeff Dean which used a "16,000 processor array to create a brain-style 'neural network' with more than a billion connections."

Hey, Dr. Dean. can you answer a few questions about your project?

In your project, what is the correct number of hidden layers to use? What algorithm or rule can I use to choose the right number of layers in my project?

Which connection scheme are you using? In a topological sense, meaning the rules that determine which nodes are connected to other nodes. Is there a way to determine the correct topology using some method?

There are over 180 different types of artificial neurons. Which ones are you using? What rule indicates that these are the correct ones to use in your application?

Neural nets in the human brain have more back-propagation circuits than forward. This would appear to be a major feature of the human brain. Does your system have this feature?

I'm a little confused on the whole AI bit. I've researched all over the literature and net, but still haven't found a constructive definition for intelligence. Help me out here - what definition of "intelligence" are you using, so that you can relate your project to the field of AI?

Looking forward to hearing from you. Thanks in advance.

(An AI researcher)