Hello, and welcome! Always good to see new people!
I think my work gets reviewed by more experienced people who might not have to spend as much time on it as I have, because I did a rough chunk of the leg work?
You are correct, in some ways. Eyewire primarily works on a consensus system. Each cube will typically be played by at least three players. The parts that the majority agree should be included in the cell are assumed to be correct, and the cell continues to grow if it doesnt end right there.
At least two higher level players (scythes or mystics) will then go through each cube in the cell to double check the consensus, before handing it over to the admins who will also give it a quick look before marking it as “complete”. We also have scouts (usually scythes in training ;P) who keep an eye on the cells too, and report any issues they find for us to fix.
I also know that to manually continue this work is not exactly feasible to get a map of the retina. So we’re ultimately training the algorithm, right?
A map of a full retina is definitely a big job. Eyewire is built around the E2198 dataset, which is a small section (just 350×300×60 µm^3) of Harold’s (the mouse) retina. You can read a little about the dataset itself on the wiki, and there was a decent write-up for one of our more recent competitions that covers a bit about the data, and some of the research that has come from us playing in this blog post.
As far as I’m aware, our tracing isnt being used to retrain the AI for eyewire (I could be wrong on that), but I think Pyr will be different in that respect, once we are allowed our hands on it.
I’m also interested in finding out more about what has been achieved or improved since this project started.
I think this blog post from october 2020 might be a good overview of how much of the dataset we have reconstructed so far - we are just about to wrap up sector 2, which is great progress. There is also the museum which i like to look at now and again, which has a nice collection of a lot of the cells we have traced.
However, I only have a vague sense of what I’m actually working towards.
I have… purposefully(?) not answered this, as I’m definitely under-qualified to give you a good answer. I’m sure somebody who knows much more than me will be along shortly. I believe that the research done with our reconstructions is focused on finding the synapses, and how the cells all interact with each other, how signals propagate, etc. I’m mainly here for the tracing and the community, though, so who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’ve rambled a bit more than i usually do, lol. Hopefully some of that gives you what you were looking for. Everyone here is a friendly bunch, and there will usually be somebody online who can answer any other questions you might have.