Brainhack coming to Illinois, March 2-4, 2017

Faculty from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have joined together to bring a mega-brainhack event to campus, March 2-4, 2017 at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. Billed as a “community-organized hackathon and unconference” the event will bring together researchers from a variety of fields to connect, collaborate, and solve neuroimaging problems involving large datasets.

The Brainhack is described as an “unconference” because the weekend is meant to be adaptive with the shape and focus of the event flowing with the problems the registrants bring to the table. Brad Sutton, one of three co-organizers and associate professor in bioengineering, said the ability for the attendees to come together and solve problems as a team is a critical element of any Brainhack event.

“Having computer scientists, bioengineers, and psychologists gather to solve problems in structural MRI, fMRI, optical imaging datasets is so important.” Sutton said. “The open collaboration helps people share knowledge for the common good. This format is becoming more and more popular with open source and cloud resources.”

BrainHack Global will take place simultaneously and Illinois is one of 40 regional sites in 16 different countries that will be sharing their work in real-time.

In addition to Sutton, the organizers for the Illinois Brainhack include Sanmi Koyejo, assistant professor in computer science, and Sepideh Sadighiani, assistant professor in psychology.

The event is currently taking registrations for researchers and technologists at https://publish.illinois.edu/brainhack2017.