Tapping into the Stream of Big Neuroscience Data through Ocean Protocol as a Vessel for Open Science and Reproducibility Principles
Website
<coming soon>
Proposal Wallet Address
0x65f4424cea0593c53fe4e34d55455238bd058a6c
(open-neuroscience.eth)
One-Sentence Summary
I am requesting a grant to bootstrap an existing community of neuroscientists to begin working with the Ocean Protocol to unleash neuroimaging data.
Categories Describing the Project
[1] Outreach / community / spread awareness (grants don’t need to be technical in nature)
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 from 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.
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.
The team has already led hack-a-thon projects themed around the neuroscience data economy and has received a warm reception from the neuroscience community!
Grant Deliverables & Roadmap
A portion of the grant will be used to fund a corporate partnership with the INCF, giving Opscientia a seat at the table to promote the benefits of the data economy for Open Science via the Ocean Protocol.
Workshops may be run in collaboration with the Georgetown Methods Lab and at the 2021 Open Science Room as part of the OHBM annual conference.
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.
Team Members
Shady El Damaty, Ph.D.
- Role : Cognitive Neuroscientist, Founder of Opscientia
- Github : github.com/seldamat
- info on projects at : seldamat.github.io
- Linkedin : linkedin.com/in/seldamat/
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.
Additional Information
This grant is a first step in building a decentralized neuroscience community running self-governed, owned, and automated science activities on-chain.