Paper by Arianna Zuanazzi, Michael P. Milham & Gregory Kiar: “Modern brain science is inherently multidisciplinary, requiring the integration of neuroimaging, psychology, behavioral science, genetics, computational neuroscience and artificial intelligence (to name a few) to advance our understanding of the brain. Critical challenges in the field of brain health — including clinical psychology, cognitive and brain sciences, and digital mental health — include the great heterogeneity of human data, small sample sizes and the subjectivity or limited reproducibility of measured constructs. Large-scale, multi-site and multimodal open science initiatives can represent a solution to these challenges (for example, see refs.); however, they often struggle with balancing data quality while maximizing sample size5 and ensuring that the resulting data are findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR). Furthermore, large-scale high-dimensional multimodal datasets demand advanced analytic approaches beyond conventional statistical models, requiring the expertise and interdisciplinary collaboration of the broader scientific community…
Data science competitions (such as Kaggle, DrivenData, CodaBench and AIcrowd) offer a powerful mechanism to bridge disciplines, solve complex problems and crowdsource novel solutions, as they bring individuals from around the world together to solve real-world problems. For more than 20 years (for example, see refs.), such competitions have been hosted by companies, organizations and research institutions to answer scientific questions, advance methods and techniques, extract valuable insights from data, promote organizations’ missions and foster collaboration with stakeholders. Every stage of a data science competition offers opportunities to promote big data exploration, advance analytic innovation and strengthen community engagement (Fig. 1). To translate these opportunities into actionable steps, we have shared our Data Science Competition Organizer Checklist at https://doi.org/10.17605/osf.io/hnx9b; this offers practical guidance for designing and implementing data science competitions in the brain health domain…(More)”
