🧠✨ Mission Coral : Onboarding Neuroscientists to the Data Economy

OceanDAO Round 6
#1

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Tapping into the Stream of Big Neuroscience Data through Ocean Protocol as a Vessel for Open Science and Reproducibility Principles

Website

https://opscientia.com

Proposal Wallet Address

0x33359285f30e7b3386de70ca500f4fe27853765b
(opscientia.eth)

Current Country of Residence

Opscientia LTD. is a Singapore registered company.

Email address

contact@opscientia.com

Twitter Handle

@opscientia

Discord

Opscientia

One-Sentence Summary

I am requesting a continuation for our grant to execute our timeline for bootstrapping an existing community of neuroscientists to begin working with the Ocean Protocol and unleash neuroimaging data.

Categories Describing the Project

[1] Outreach / community / spread awareness (grants don’t need to be technical in nature)

Funding Amount Requested

27.200 $OCEAN

Remaining Treasury Balance

Mission Coral has received 23.842 $OCEAN from previous funding rounds (III,IV,V), a total of 10.000 $OCEAN remains in our Treasury.

Project Overview

The field of neuroscience has generated an ocean of data, estimated to be in excess of an exabyte, collected from brain imaging studies of fish, rodents, primates, and humans. Most of this data remains siloed in individual labs - often in proprietary formats and inaccessible to the public. Recent movements in the neuroimaging community have embraced open science principles and a trickling stream of curated datasets has begun to flow onto public internet forums, making detailed measurements of the brain available in great detail for the first time.

Problem: Educating Neuroscientists about the Decentralized Web and Data Economy through Ocean Protocol

A major obstacle preventing this trickle from cascading into a torrent is the absence of incentives to share expensive and meticulously collected data on public platforms where others may take credit or abuse the data. The Ocean protocol has taken steps to remove this obstacle with the introduction of data tokens, marketplaces, and confidential cloud computing. However, the concepts of tokenization, blockchain, and the potential of a distributed web 3.0 have yet to penetrate the neuroscience community.

Solution: Educational Events, Materials and Data Bounties for Neuroscientists

I am requesting a grant to bootstrap an existing community of neuroscientists to begin working with the Ocean Protocol to unleash neuroimaging data.

The grant will make possible the creation of educational materials, monitored community forums, virtual workshops, and hack-a-thons, in addition to providing data and developer bounties. These goals are set with the purpose of onboarding neuroscientists onto the data economy through the Ocean Protocol.

This grant will bootstrap an existing community of neuroscience data engineers, researchers, and software developers through the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF), Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM), Georgetown University Methods Lab, and the Global Brain Hack.

We have assembled a list of 800+ research laboratories and neurotech companies and plan to survey current research data management needs and the intersection of priorities with the value proposition of the Ocean Protocol.

What is the Expected ROI?

Simple educational events will introduce neuroscientists to existing resources for unleashing their data to share and build upon with colleagues. Over time and as interest builds around the world, adoption is expected to snowball. Likewise, consumption of data tokens will be a trickle at first as we develop pipelines for tokenizing neuroscience datasets on the blockchain.

This grant will also generate critical feedback for the Ocean Protocol to understand current data needs and problems from scientists’ perspectives. Early ROI will likely be low as hidden barriers to adoption are revealed, but a large ROI > 1 can be expected as up to 20k academic neuroscience data providers around the world become activated as consumers and contributors to the Ocean Protocol.

We will establish quantitative metrics for hidden barriers and attitudes towards data markets, Web 3.0, and the Ocean Protocol’s services by deploying user research materials, such as workshops and surveys, with members in the neuroimaging community. This will help us establish a market segment of potential contributors to the data economy and more accurately predict future ROI.

We are projecting a short-term goal for hosting 1 neuroimaging dataset on Ocean Marketplace and up to 10 models for consumption on compute-to-data by the end of our outreach roadmap to demonstrate proof-of-concept for the neuroimaging community. We can model the ROI of future Unleash Data campaigns based on the success of these pools.

The team has already led 3 hack-a-thon projects themed around the neuroscience data economy and has received a warm reception from the neuroscience community! We also recently received a finalist prize at the May EthGlobal Hackathon for our work on the Open Science Data Wallet.

ROI: buck

If awarded, this project would have received 51.042 $OCEAN in grant funds (buck). Our current deliverables of ROI feeding back into the system include growing a Data DAO (63 total community members, ~12 active contributors) running on Ocean Marketplace, supporting hack-a-thon teams building on Ocean, providing mentorship to summer undergraduate research fellows working on Ocean Protocol projects, and engaging with scientists at scientific conferences.

ROI: bang

We expect our efforts will provide a template for other teams of researchers and scientists looking to build on Ocean. If we capture 10% of the 800+ neurotech labs we have identifed, we can expect them to follow our template to unleash their data. The average cost of neuroimaging dataset is ~$800 USD per participant. A research laboratory collects upwards of 100 participants per project (lower bound based on typical statistical power required for neuroimaging sample size analyses). We can expect each dataset to be worth 133.333 $OCEAN at current prices. For example, if 10% of the 800+ labs identified follow our template to contribute data to the Ocean Market, we can expect a total value of 10.666.640 $OCEAN (bang) in neuroimaging data staked on the market place.

The hypothetical ROI following this model results in a value of >200 (bang/buck) with a 100% chance of success, >100 with a 50% chance, >40 with a 20% chance, >10 with a 10% chance, >1 with a 1% chance. We believe the chance of success of the realized outcome described above grows significantly based on when in time success is assessed, specifically increasing significantly towards the end of the grant’s roadmap for deliverables.

ROI: [bang / buck] x p(success)

Therefore, bang for buck for this proposal can only stand to disproportionately benefit the Ocean DAO

Grant Deliverables

This grant supports the following deliverables:

  1. Conference Workshops & Seminars
  1. Google summer of code projects on the data economy
  1. Hack-a-Thons on Data Interoperability Standards for Web 3.0 and ETHGlobal Hack-a-Thon for Opscientia’s Open Science Data Wallet
  2. Corporate partnerships with Neuroinformatics Consortia and to support development of open source toolkits for the neuroscience community
  3. Survey and quantitative metrics regarding attitudes toward the Data Economy, Ocean Academy, and Web 3.0
  4. Providing initial liquidity to publish the first neuroimaging dataset pool and applications for compute-to-data
  5. Content in the form of videos, code walk throughs, articles, opinion pieces hosted on the OpscientiaDAO blog
  6. Stipend supplements and sponsorships for fellows and scholars contributing to decentralized science open source development, such as the Opscientia Open Web Fellowship

Roadmap

  • March 1-9 — Google Summer of Code: Student/Mentor Q&A
  • April 19 - 23 — Presentation at the Neuroinformatics Assembly
  • April 14 - May 2 — Google Summer of Code: Student/Mentor Matching
  • May 14 — Kernel Block III Fellowships for BUIDL Track
  • May 17 — Google Summer of Code Onboarding
  • June 21-25 — Organization for Human Brain Mapping
  • June 7 - August 17 — Google Summer of Code: Open Hacking
  • August 15 — Neurotech survey respondents, first wave
  • August 31 — First draft of educational materials to be hosted on https://www.opscientia.com/learn/
    educational materials pushed back in timeline as we conduct user testing and build platform

All workshop materials, meetings, and code will be made publicly accessible on Github. Meeting events, topic posts, and tutorials will be hosted on medium. These events may be run every 4-6 weeks or more frequently as funding and open interest allow.

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Opscientia is a company providing onboarding services and software infrastructure for launching decentralized autonomous organizations on distributed cloud public networks and smart contract blockchains. The team lead is an active member and contributor of the INCF, OHBM, and Brainhack Community.

Core Team Members

Shady El Damaty, M.Sc., Ph.D.

Sarah Hamburg, M.S., Ph.D.

Daniel Byington, M.Sc., M.B.A.

Liliana Muscarella, M.A.

Miri Rossitto, Founder @ COWE Communications

Alexandra McCarroll, M.Sc. (in proc)

Kinshuk Kashyap, Summer Fellow

Achintya Kumar, Summer Fellow

Additional Information
This grant is a first step in building a decentralized neuroscience community running self-governed, owned, and automated science activities on-chain --> Opscientia DAO

1 Like
#2

This is an impressive roadmap and track record! Full speed and support ahead.

1 Like
#3

Thank you Kai! OceanDAO has given us the momentum to build our swell into a movement. We are very grateful for all the support, guidance, and cheer to carry this wave on a trip around the world as we connect the gap between Ocean and Open Science :raised_hands::test_tube:

1 Like
#4

Deliverable Checklist Update
OCEAN DAO ROUND 6

[x] Conference Workshops & Seminars

Our team has presented at multiple conferences and hackathons, including the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility Conference and the Organization for Human Brain Mapping.

As part of this, we have conducted user research on token economies and the pain points for researchers working with cloud computing workflows. This information will help us perform user requirement design as we finalise our architecture for an application to support Decentralised Scientific Workflows.

[x] Training & Development

The OceanDAO grant enabled us as a team to take part in Kernel Block III.

Below are the deliverables for training and development:

  • Opscientia were chosen as one of the top projects to present in the Final Showcase.

  • We have also summarised our incredible experience in a blog.

[x] Google Summer of Code Project

The OceanDAO grant directly supported mentorship for Google Summer of Code to work on open-source projects at the intersection of Open Science and Web 3.0.

Below are the deliverables for the GSoC Project:

[x] Hackathon Spree

OceanDAO has helped us take part in multiple hackathons over the summer and this has resulted in Opscientia being rewarded for our work and helping spotlight the importance of open science to the wider Web3 and scientific communities.

  • The team took part in the ETHGlobal Web3Weekend hackathon to build a proof-of-concept of our Data Wallet. The next steps include building out the minimum viable product for scientists to use and test by the end of 2021.

  • Our blog post outlining our experience at the ETHGlobal Web3Weekend hackathon - Opscientia DAO Wins Multiple Awards at the EthGlobal Hackathon

  • The team also took part in the OHBM Brainhack 2021. Our GitHub issue explains our submission in greater detail

  • We gathered user-research feedback from 5 scientists at the OHBM Brainhack. From this, we validated current pain points around academia and data. We gathered initial feedback on our Data Wallet proof-of-concept and sourced questions and comments to flesh out our FAQ’s.

[x] Corporate partnerships with Neuroinformatics Consortia and to support the development of open-source toolkits for the neuroscience community

  • Our partnership over the summer with Google’s GSoC was a success.

  • We are continuing this work by drafting best practices for reproducible science and publishing the methods of how Web3 will help accelerate the improvement of those practices. This is an ongoing process and will help us develop functional, and user-first tools for scientists.

[x] Survey and quantitative metrics regarding attitudes toward the Data Economy, Ocean Academy, and Web 3.0

  • Further to the OHBM hackathon we carried out user-research in the community and have gathered 12 responses which have validated pain points, levels of understanding, and feedback on our vision. This further helped us to generate our FAQ’s and generate high-level user-requirements for the Opsciverse.

[x] Providing initial liquidity to publish the first neuroimaging dataset pool and applications for compute-to-data

  • This work is ongoing and initial steps have been taken to publish BIDS Apps and Shady’s brain :scream: on the gaia-x testnet.

[x] Content creation

@AlexN