In August Bastian attended this year’s edition of the Neurohackademy, organized by Ariel Rokem and Tal Yarkoni of the eScience Institute at the University of Washington in Seattle.
The Neurohackademy is a two weeks long hybrid of summer school and hackathon. In the first week, participants attend workshops organized by internationally leading scientists from academia and industry in the field of neuroimaging. Workshops range from topics like Reproducibility over Cloud-based Computing to AI and Neuroethics. In the second week, attendees propose hackathon projects and work on them full-time.
Bastian himself proposed the “deGANerate” tool and developed it together with a group of seven other, international attendees. They utilized cyclic Generative Adversarial Networks, a deep learning technique, to simulate and synthesize atrophic brains out of healthy young ones, in a similar fashion as the well-known FaceApp is able to predict, how one would look like 30 years from now. Apart from all the learning, networking and hacking, there was of course enough time to explore the local brewery scene of Seattle. (Photographs by Jane Koh)