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AHH Hackathon – Predicting biological age from MEG

On the 9-13 December a Hackathon was organised by the Australian Hearing Hub and the Macquarie University Department of Computing. The goal is to develop collaborations within the Australian Hearing Hub and across Macquarie University, generating grant applications and projects leading to innovative technologies in hearing research.

As a consequence of increased average lifespan, age-related cognitive decline has become a pressing public health concern. The early detection of deviations from normal neurocognitive ageing is recognised as being critical the deployment of early intervention.

The link between age and direct measures of brain function is therefore of special practical significance in neuroscientific research – a description of the normative trajectory of functional brain age is the ultimate goal of this challenge.

32 people attended the hackathon and were tasked with exploring solutions to develop computational methods that can predict the biological age of an MEG dataset based upon a training dataset. Data consisted of a database of MEG resting-state recordings.

On the fifth day, seven groups presented their projects to three expert judges, Associate Professor Paul Sowman, Department of Cognitive Science, Associate Professor Steve Cassidy, Department of Computing and Associate Professor Mark Dras, Department of Computing.

Congratulations to Regression Obsession (Eric Jiang, Rounok Tikmani and David Warren) for winning  the competition.

Left to Right: Steve Cassidy Eric Jiang, Rounok Tikmani, David Warren and Paul Sowman
Left to Right: Steve Cassidy Eric Jiang, Rounok Tikmani, David Warren and Paul Sowman

Second prize and People’s Choice Award was awarded to MEG Hackers (Judy Zhu, Tim Chard, Hamid Karimi Rouzbahani and Christine Nguyen)

Left to right: Steve Cassidy, Judy Zhu, Tim Chard, Hamid Karimi Rouzbahani, Christine Nguyen and Paul Sowman
Left to right: Steve Cassidy, Judy Zhu, Tim Chard, Hamid Karimi Rouzbahani, Christine Nguyen and Paul Sowman

All the projects were of high quality, innovative and well presented. Well done to all the teams for their hard work.

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