Photosynth as a metaphor for an even bigger challenge
Remember the software that uses lots of casually taken photos of a scene and somehow combines them into a 3D model that you could then navigate in a breathtakingly intuitive way? Well, what if you could do the same with independently created scientific research databases?
It was a pretty amazing achievement to take such random photos and stitch them together perfectly enough to make something so uncannily smooth, but in science, the challenge of stitching together such things as databases from unrelated projects makes devising Photosynth look like child’s play.
This video shows that even when we just try to knit together far-flung databases of research from a single field of study, ‘Neurosciencesynth’ will inevitably be taking interdisciplinary collaboration to dizzying new heights.
This talk was entitled:
Establishing a Global Neuroscience Information Framework
It was given by by Maryann E. Martone, Professor-in-Residence in the Department of Neurosciences and Co-Director of the National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research (NCMIR) at the University of California San Diego.
The event was a Research Open House celebrating the 10th anniversary of the foundation of Calit2, the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology
Calit2 is an academic research institution jointly run by the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and University of California, Irvine
Here’s the legendary presentation of Photosynth at TED:
She’s a clever one.
I’ve heard the idea suggested before, but she does more about beginning to come to concrete beginnings to the solution. I think that organizations like Bing or Google are always going to be pressing towards this sort of global data organization because the future of search tech is artificial intellegence. Just two other videos which come to mind which predate her suggestion in a nontechnical way are: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMFOEO6mM-c and http://vimeo.com/11537621 Maryanne, in addition to spelling out some of the technical challenges, also is unique in that she suggests that each contributer begin assessing how their pieces of research can best benefit the whole. This is perhaps analogous to Photosynth contributers taking strategic note of what has been synthed already in their town and what the most important things to synth are, in order to provide the most benefit to the most people. For more Photosynth-related videos, please see my spreadsheet at http://docs.com/XFO
Thanks Nate, very helpful response!