DecMeg 2014 - DecMeg2014 competition: decoding the human brain

DecMeg2014: decoding the human brain
Predict visual stimuli from MEG recordings of human brain activity
https://www.kaggle.com/c/decoding-the-human-brain
Understanding how the human brain works is a primary goal in
neuroscience research. Non-invasive functional neuroimaging
techniques, such as magnetoencephalography (MEG), are able to capture
the brain activity as multiple timeseries. When a subject is presented
a stimulus and the concurrent brain activity is recorded, the relation
between the pattern of recorded signal and the category of the
stimulus may provide insights on the underlying mental process. Among
the approaches to analyse the relation between brain activity and
stimuli, the one based on predicting the stimulus from the concurrent
brain recording is called brain decoding. The goal of this competition
is brain decoding across subjects: a large number of MEG recordings
from multiple subjects, together with the respective category of
stimulus, are available as train set, while the test set comprises MEG
recordings from a different set of subjects. Because of the
variability across subjects in brain anatomy and in the patterns of
brain activity, a certain degree of difference is expected between the
data of different subjects and thus between the train set and the test
set.
This competition is associated with the the 19th International
Conference on Biomagnetism, Biomag 2014, Halifax (Canada), August
24-28, 2014.
The competition begins: April 21st, 2014.
The competition ends: July 27th, 2014.
Prizes: 1st 3,000 USD, 2nd 1,500 USD, 3rd 500 USD.
Organizers: Emanuele Olivetti, Seyed Mostafa Kia and Paolo Avesani
(NeuroInformatics Lab, Bruno Kessler Foundation and University of
Trento, IT), e-mail: decmeg2014-AT-list.fbk.eu.
The awards of this competition are funded by Elekta Oy, MEG
International Services Ltd (MISL), Fondazione Bruno Kessler, and
Besa. We would also like to thank Daniel Wakeman (Martinos Center,
MGH, USA), Richard Henson (MRC/CBU, Cambridge, UK), Ole Jensen
(Donders Institute, NL), Nathan Weisz (University of Trento, IT) and
Alexandre Gramfort (Telecom ParisTech, CNRS, CEA / Neurospin) for
their contributions in preparing this competition.
Relevant links:
- competition website: https://www.kaggle.com/c/decoding-the-human-brain
- Biomag 2014: http://www.biomag2014.org
- NeuroInformatics Lab: http://nilab.fbk.eu
- Elekta Oy: http://www.elekta.com
- MISL (CTF MEG): http://www.ctfmeg.com
- Fondazione Bruno Kessler: http://www.fbk.eu
- Besa GmbH: http://www.besa.de
Please feel free to forward this message to your colleagues or
contacts who might be interested in this competition.