
How to Map the Brain - sohkamyung
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02208-0
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melling
Crowdsourcing is being used:

[https://eyewire.org/explore](https://eyewire.org/explore)

“Computers can perform segmentation faster than the human eye, which cuts down
the time it takes to trace neurons to a matter of minutes or hours. But they
aren’t as accurate: algorithms can miss out bits of neuron or incorrectly
merge two neurons into one. People are therefore still needed to check the
reconstruction. Seung is tackling this requirement through crowdsourcing and,
specifically, an online game called Eyewire, in which players are challenged
to correct mistakes in the rough draft of a connectome. ”

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karmickoala
Someone highlighted this on ML Twitter:

> “The enormous amount of time, effort & money that goes into such projects
> might be overkill. I don’t need to know the precise details of the wiring of
> each cell and each synapse in the brain. What I need to know, instead, is
> the organizational principles that wire them together.”

I think this endeavor might still be useful, e.g., it may help identify
missing elements in a model. An example of that in another field:
astrophysicists did know the organizational principles to build galaxy
kinematics models, but only using the Schwarzchild's method---which is akin to
mapping the galaxy---they were able to confirm that supermassive black holes
should be at the center of most galaxies. Hence, both approaches (machine
learning and mapping the brain) may walk hand in hand, helping identify such
organizational principles.

~~~
melling
There’s always someone with an opposing opinion.

In the 1990’s there was a debate on the value of the Supercollider vs the
Hubble. People would argue that the Hubble was of little scientific value.

