NeuroHackademy Workshop
July - August 2024
Had such a great time @neurohackademy in Seattle these past two weeks! Huge thanks to the organizers @arokem @noahbenson, all of the faculty, and my hackathon team for such an amazing experience! #Neurohackademy #Neurohackademy2024 #OpenScience #Neuroscience #DataScience pic.twitter.com/pzED8zhIuP
— Sophia Mehdizadeh (@skmehdizadeh) August 12, 2024
NeuroHackademy is a summer workshop hosted by the University of Washington eScience institute, at the intersection of neuroscience and data science.
I was accepted as a participant in the 2024 workshop, where I learned valuable skills for working with large datasets and best practices for open and reproducible science. During the second half of the workshop, I had the opportunity to collaborate with other researchers from various fields of neuroscience in a hackathon. My group’s hackathon project was to build a web application using the Python Voila and Voici libraries that would allow for interactive exploration of the Human Connectome Project Young Adult dataset—one of the biggest collaborative research efforts to map the human brain. Learning about these tools has given me the skillset to more effectively communicate and share my research not only within the academic community, but in a way that is engaging to the general public as well.
Technical skills:
- GitHub workflows: using issues, branches, and pull requests effectively to work as a team.
- GitHub actions & GitHub pages: deploying and hosting a website.
- iPyWidgets: coding interactive user interfaces in Python.
- Voila & Voici: turning Jupyter notebooks into web applications.
- Reproducibility & open science: specifying software environments.
Check out the demo of our web applicaion! NOTE: When the page loads, click on DEMO.IPYNB from the menu!
Check out our project GitHub repository!
NOTE: the web-version of our project only showcases limited functionality due to challenges faced when compiling to web assembly. To experience the full functionality of what we were able to create in such a short time, please clone the repository, navigate to the content directory, and run the DEMO.IPYNB notebook.