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Pittsburgh Brain Activity Interpretation Competition:
Inferring Experience Based Cognition from fMRI

Awards to be presented at the
Organization for Human Brain Mapping Conference
June 15, 2006
Florence, Italy

Prizes: 1st $10,000; 2nd $5,000; 3rd $2,000 (US dollars)
For details see: http://www.ebc.pitt.edu/competition.htm

We are pleased to announce a machine learning competition involving brain image data. The data set to be provided is a time series of fMRI images that reflect activity in a human subject's brain while they watch a movie. The classification task is to predict when the human subject sees a face in the movie, who was it, whether anybody was speaking, and a variety of other cognitive experiences of the subject who is viewing the movie.

This competition is being organized by the Organization for Human Brain Mapping, and is designed to make it easy for researchers unfamiliar with fMRI to participate (e.g., by preprocessing and documenting the data sets). The purpose of this competition is to challenge groups to infer subjective experience from a rigorously collected fMRI data set associated with viewing of movies (with a quantitative metric of success). The goal is to advance our understanding of how the brain encodes, represents, and operates on dynamic experience.

To advance the methodology and assess the state of the science, competitive prizes will be awarded to groups who best predict subjective ratings on multiple dimensions from their fMRI signal. Groups from all nations and disciplines are encouraged to participate. Entries can be individuals, research groups or classes. Interdisciplinary efforts across computational/cognitive neuroscience communities are encouraged. There are no restrictions on publication of the data other than crediting the data source and maintaining subject confidentiality. Awardees will be required to describe their methods and either present the methods or provide written descriptions at the Competition Workshop at the Organization for Human Brain Mapping June 11-15, 2006 in Florence, Italy. This competition is run by the Experience Based Cognition Research group at the University of Pittsburgh under a DARPA basic research grant.

All decisions will be made by the competition scientific advisory board including W. Schneider & G. Siegle (University of Pittsburgh - coordinating site); A. Bartels (Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics); E. Formisano & R. Goebel (Maastricht University); J. Haxby (Princeton University); U. Hasson (New York University & Weizmann Institute); T. Mitchell (Carnegie Mellon University); T. Nichols (University of Michigan).