Pittsburgh Brain Activity Interpretation Competition

Inferring Experience Based Cognition from fMRI

Prizes: 1st $10,000; 2nd $5,000; 3rd $2,000 (US dollars)

For details see: [www.ebc.pitt.edu]



WebCast Overview March 1, 2006 at 10AM EST
(See website for WebCast link)



Modern advances in brain imaging provide the foundation for interpreting
relationships between (fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging)) brain
activation signals and subjective human experience. The purpose of this
competition is to challenge groups to infer subjective experience from a
rigorously collected fMRI data set associated with viewing of movies (with
a quantitative metric of success). The goal is to advance the
understanding of how the brain encodes, represents, and operates on
dynamic experience.



Ideally, the analysis of brain activation patterns can characterize what
an observer experienced (e.g., was there a face present in the movie? who
was it? was someone speaking? was the event pleasant? how attentive was
the viewer?). To advance the methodology and assess the state of the
science, competitive prizes will be awarded to groups who best predict
subjective ratings on multiple dimensions from their fMRI signal. Groups
from all nations and disciplines are encouraged to participate. There are
no restrictions on publication of the data other than crediting the data
source and maintaining subject confidentiality. Awardees will be required
to describe their methods and either present the methods or provide
written descriptions at the Competition Workshop at the Organization for
Human Brain Mapping on June 15, 2006 in Florence, Italy.



This competition is run by the Experience Based Cognition Research group
at the University of Pittsburgh under a DARPA basic research grant. All
decisions will be made by the competition scientific advisory board
including W. Schneider & G. Siegle (University of Pittsburgh -
coordinating site); A. Bartels (Max Planck Institute for Biological
Cybernetics); E. Formisano & R. Goebel (Maastricht University); J. Haxby
(Princeton University); U. Hasson (New York University & Weizmann
Institute); T. Mitchell (Carnegie Mellon University); T. Nichols
(University of Michigan).

------------------------------------------
Posted to Phorum via PhorumMail