Wisdom Of The Week

I have been working with Kaggle datasets for over month now and American Epilepsy Society Seizure Prediction Challenge dataset is my favorite. I am still in a learning stage so I stayed away from huge dataset's like this one which require a lot of preprocessing. But little did I realize this competition had such a profound impact on the Epilepsy research - Epilepsy Research Benefits from the Crowd:

For millions of people with epilepsy, life comes with too many restrictions. If they just had a reliable way to predict when their next seizure will come, they could have a chance at leading more independent and productive lives.

That’s why it is so encouraging to hear that researchers have developed a new algorithm that can predict the onset of a seizure correctly 82 percent of the time. Until recently, the best algorithm was hardly better than flipping a coin, leading some to speculate that seizures are random neurological events that can’t be predicted at all. But the latest leap forward shows that seizures certainly can be predicted, and our research efforts are headed in the right direction to make them even more predictable. The other big news is how this new algorithm was developed: it’s the product of a crowdsourcing competition.

The teams analyzed a huge data set detailing the electrical activity in the brains of people while under evaluation for surgery to treat their epilepsy. They also had an even larger data set from studies with dogs, whose epilepsy closely resembles that seen in people.

The competition shows that sharing data to collaborate on complex problems can yield clever and unexpected solutions. Also noteworthy is that none of the winners were clinicians. This suggests that if we can find a platform to engage players from other seemingly distant disciplines, the chances are greater to find innovative, out-of-the-box solutions to current challenges..

That’s why NINDS has launched iEEG.org to catalyze collaboration and sharing of datasets, algorithms, and research tools for BigData studies of epilepsy. On this website are almost 2,000 datasets freely available for analysis, and there is already a user base of more than 670 active collaborators. It will be exciting to see how long it takes to go even beyond that 82 percent predictability..

This is what big data, ML and AI in general is all about. Integrating knowledge from data and wisdom of the crowds to bring in changes to benefit all species. Please don't confuse this with utopia and nirvana but think of it as a small step towards giving every living being a chance to live and enjoy the time on this blue planet pleasurable.