Computational
Neuroscience Programming Contest: 2010
Hosted by:
David M. Devilbiss
, Ph.D.
Neural Systems and Behavioral Lab
Department of Psychology
University of Wisconsin - Madison
As part of my ongoing commitment to provide educational opportunities, I have developed a neural analysis programming contest through the Neural Systems and Behavioral Lab in the Psychology Department
of the University of Wisconsin - Madison. The learning objectives of this project are to 1) introduce students to computational neuroscience approaches, 2) educate and engage researchers outside the field of
neuroscience in computational techniques and issues in neuroscience, and 3) build an open community and forum discussion for computational approaches in neuroscience.
Previous Contests:
PSTH Challenge of 2009
The Winner was Wildenberg!
With a computation time of 0.004121 sec on one of 8 cores Intel Xeon E5345 2.33 GHz with 8 GB RAM.
The McCabe complexity = 4.
He/she took an interesting approach that was computationally efficient and used poisson confidence limits.
The code is avalable in the
final submissions folder.
Contest Status:
The 2010 contest is now officially OPEN.
Thank you all for participating and good luck !
This contest will be run in a similar fashon to contests held by
Mathworks, Inc. For an example see:
Army Ants Contest
The "Rules" of the contest are posted
Here.
The test data sets can me found
Here. Please send
David an email when you download the sample data so he can report usage statistics to NSF.
Since this is the 1st of its kind hosted by the Department of
Psychology, the infrastructure is still being built and you input will
be greatly appreciated.
Important Information:
1) The contest begins on February 22nd 2010 and will end April 1st 2010 (no pun intended).
2) Traditionally there is a queue to run your programs. However, we are
providing a
sand box to
collaborate and share your code if desired.
3) Matlab can be found on the University of Wisconsin - Madison public computers.
For a list of available sites:
http://www.doit.wisc.edu/computerlabs/software_locations.asp?SWID=95
4) As described in the "Rules", final submissions can be uploaded to the folder:
final_submissions
5) Although the prize for winning this contest is not determined, I am trying to put together some tee-shirts etc.
6) The winner will be announced on this website shortly after the contest is completed. I am looking into having a short celebration and lecture
on how this code is actually implemented in real-world neuroscience studies and a more in depth background regarding neuronal signal processing.
7) If you have any questions, please feel free to contact Dr. Devilbiss
with the subject header "Programming Contest".
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0918555.
