Human neuroscience – Crowdsourcing, Citizen Science, and Data-sharing | Learning Sciences

"The future of human neuroscience lies in crowdsourcing, citizen science, and data sharing but it is not without its minefields.

A recent Scientific American article by Daniel Goodwin, 'Why Neuroscience Needs Hackers,' makes the case that neuroscience, like many fields today, is drowning in data, begging for application of advances in computer science like machine learning. Neuroscientists are able to gather realms of neural data, but often without big data mechanisms and frameworks to synthesize them.

The SA article describes the work of Sebastian Seung, a Princeton neuroscientist, who recently mapped the neural connections of the human retina from an 'overwhelming mass' of electron microscopy data using state of the art A.I. and massive crowd-sourcing. Seung incorporated the A.I. into a game called 'Eyewire' where 1,000s of volunteers scored points while improving the neural map. Although the article’s title emphasizes advanced A.I., Dr. Seung’s experiment points even more to crowdsourcing and open science, avenues for improving research that have suddenly become easy and powerful with today’s internet. Eyewire perhaps epitomizes successful crowdsourcing — using an application that gathers, represents, and analyzes data uniformly according to researchers’ needs."