This year, the contest is looking for powerful, state-of-the-art approaches that aim towards helping domain scientists to understanding the changing structures within the human brain. This includes determining a simulation’s state and questions about the similarities and dissimilarities of simulation outcomes. Some questions that researchers hope to answer are: Which parts of the brain are more active in firing and restructuring than others? Can it be determined when the neurons reached a steady state using the calcium concentration and the fluctuation in grown elements? Is that the case for all neurons and/or simulations simultaneously? How are still-alive neurons affected by the loss of neighboring neurons based on lesions? Does “learning” improve the connections of groups of neurons?
Here we give a possible list of tasks a submission can follow. This is, however, only a suggestion and can be altered and extended by the participants:
- Overview of data: Create a basic framework that allows showing, exploring, and comparing the different datasets to gain a first insight into the data.
- Visualization of plasticity changes: Create the functionality that allows analyzing when and where creation, rewiring, and deletion events happen. How many regions/neurons are part of such events? How is this related to calcium levels? How can it be shown, that a simulation has reached a steady state? How far is the impact of events such as learning or lesions?
- Ensemble visualization: Find ways to indicate differences and similarities between the simulations. Where do the different simulations show similar or dissimilar behavior also compared to tasks 1 and 2?
- Workflow: Try to combine the functionality of the other tasks into a combined framework and interface that enables experts to interactively explore the data and investigate the questions mentioned above. Which tools help the users to mark, select and analyze the data on different levels of complexity and transfer information among these levels?
Besides the overall first, second, and third place winners, this year’s jury will additionally award prizes to the:
- best report cover visualization
- best activity overview visualization
- best workflow