Although EyeWire’s team competition infrastructure is now robust, the first competitions had no back-end infrastructure. The third challenge was providing a technical solution for participation.
CROWDSOURCING HUMAN BRAIN MAPPING HOW TO
The reality is that getting your project out there is not enough - you must also consider how to keep people engaged even after they register. This doubled participation and laid the foundation for today’s more robust challenge infrastructure.Īgain, project staff assumed that new users would spread the news about the project after it’s launched, recruiting their friends in an exponential growth curve. The project responded by launching competitions, allowing players to join teams and compete.
CROWDSOURCING HUMAN BRAIN MAPPING REGISTRATION
About a month after launch, EyeWire saw a sharp decline in registration and participation. People on the Web will share things they find cool, funny and interesting. The reality is that you must work to help people find you! You have to reach out to journalists, be present on social media and remember not to take your project too seriously. The EyeWire team initially assumed that if you build an amazing project, people will flock to it and participate. They personally reached out to journalists, introducing the project and asking them to write articles when they launched the project in December 2012. On Facebook, they focused on sharing funny and beautiful science images. Prior to launching, project developers created social channels (Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and a blog) and seeded them with great content about the project and neuroscience in general. EyeWire didn’t magically grow into a vibrant community of hundreds of thousands of people. The first challenge was establishing and growing a community. Multiple players map each cube then their work is compared. They scroll through the cube and reconstruct neurons in segments with the help of an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm, making connections that the AI missed. The goal of the game is to map neurons, allowing researchers to identify new synapses and cell types. Players map branches of a neuron from one side of a cube to the other. The retina plays a role in motion processing. The game is based on mapping the retina - a part of the eye, but also part of the central nervous system. They need only be curious and enjoy solving puzzles. Anyone can play and players need no scientific background. Launched in 2012, EyeWire is a game that uses crowdsourcing to help map the brain.
![crowdsourcing human brain mapping crowdsourcing human brain mapping](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/0vv8moc6/psychtimes/eb50d9c610d0577e95ff6beea380a3eb375e7952-4103x2735.jpg)
Capitalizing on this ability, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, developers and designers are turning EyeWire into a gaming platform to map the brain. People can still do many things better than computers, including recognizing patterns. EyeWire utilizes something more intelligent than even the most powerful supercomputer - the human brain.
![crowdsourcing human brain mapping crowdsourcing human brain mapping](https://www.citizenscience.gov/assets/img/toolkit-images/case-study-eyewire-02-300x300.gif)
To accelerate the pace of neuroscience, Seung Lab, formerly at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and now at Princeton University, created EyeWire to crowdsource data analysis of brain neurons using an online game.
![crowdsourcing human brain mapping crowdsourcing human brain mapping](https://www.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/styles/half_2x/public/images/2018/05/neurons.jpg)
Even so, it takes a neuroscientist tens of hours to reconstruct a single cell. Neurons are miniscule, so researchers are utilizing a new imaging technique to map their connectivity. So it’s no surprise that neuroscientists are only just starting to understand how the brain is wired. The human brain has roughly 80 billion neurons connected with millions of miles of axons and dendrites.