Arno Klein and the Mindboggle Team Emerge Victorious at the Human Brain Mapping Hackathon in Seattle

Arno Klein, PhD

Arno Klein, PhD and the "Mindboggle-102" team (Rich Stoner, Jason Tourville, Jay Bohland and Dr. Klein) used the Mindboggle software to win the "MNI Mashup" challenge at the Human Brain Mapping Hackathon in Seattle WA. The winners were announced on June 20, 2013.

The contest took place at the 19th Annual Meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping, an international society dedicated to using imaging to discover the organization of the human brain. The meeting included the annual Human Brain Mapping Hackathon, a meeting-long competition, sponsored by the Allen Institute for Brain Science and Amazon Web Services, designed to accelerate the connection between open neuroscience and cloud computing.

For the hackathon, sponsors provided space on the exhibit floor and access to an array of publicly accessible neuroimaging data and resources. Contestants were offered three challenges, two of which were announced prior to the meeting and a third revealed only after the meeting began. The third challenge, the MNI Mashup, which was won by Dr. Klein and his colleagues, required the development of an innovative map or aggregation of information about the human brain in the MNI 152 standard, which is a template for brain anatomy developed by the Montreal Neurological Institute.

The Mindboggle team won by creating a browser-based application that integrates anatomical label, shape, and gene expression data in a single human brain image.