UROP at Seung Lab

Project: Game Developer for EyeWire, “A Game to Map the Brain”

Department/Lab/Center: Media Lab + Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Faculty Supervisor: Sebastian Seung

Are you a gamer and/or a rockstar programmer?

EyeWire is accepting UROP applications for fall 2013. We’re a citizen science game designed to crowdsource the analysis of neural circuits at the cellular level – and do it bigger than anyone has done it before! The game works at a scale far smaller than technologies you may be familiar with such as fMRI. We’re working at tens of nanometers as we reconstruct neurons in three dimensions. Cell-by-cell reconstruction is difficult, but we believe it is immensely important for the future of neuroscience. Hence, we are crowd-sourcing the work; work that is too difficult for the best artificial intelligence to do alone.

EyeWire is played by over 80,000 people in 130+ countries. See blog.eyewire.org/about for more information or read about us in WIRED and Forbes.

We need you! Seung Lab has several projects for fall 2013 UROPs. Here’s a sampling of what you could work on:

• Develop new game mechanics.

• Help us grow an ecosystem of brain game developers in the public.

• Help us figure out who’s playing and how to reach more players.

• Take us mobile!

We consider UROPs a part of the lab and prefer students who are interested in colla- borating over multiple semesters.

Minimum Hours: 10 per week

You should be comfortable programming in web technologies. Javascript proficiency is required. SQL, PHP and HTML/CSS abilities are preferred.

EyeWire is a project of Seung Lab of Computational Neuroscience and jointly housed at Brain and Cognitive Sciences Dept and MIT Media Lab. We collaborate with several labs on campus and numerous researchers around the world including Harvard and Max Planck Institute.

To apply, send a cover letter and your CV to support at eyewire dot org.