Project Description
Title: Cerebral Cortex: An Open-Source Platform for Computational Modeling of High-Frequency Data
Presenter: Dr. Nasir Ali & Dr. Timothy Hnat
Presented: January 16, 2020
Link: https://youtu.be/Botevzi1L-U
About the presentation: 
Mobile sensor big data research has resulted in an exponential increase, over the past decade, in the amount of information collected about individuals in real-world settings. These increases create compounding problems for the researchers that need to develop, analyze, and report their findings based on these ever growing data sets. MD2K developed the Cerebral Cortex platform to address many of the challenges with these types of studies and data analyses through a high-performance real-time data collection and analysis platform to support in-the-field participants through interactive web dashboards. Additionally, Cerebral Cortex enables the bring-your-own-data model, allowing researchers to ingest any type of structured data into the system. The core of the platform is a library of research-grade biomarker algorithms that can be deployed at scale across a variety of data sources and are easily adapted to other types of data, enabling an accelerated development timeline for new algorithms and techniques. This webinar will introduce details of how computing researchers can use the platform to conduct novel analytics, visualization, and discovery from large-scale mobile sensor data via a Jupyter notebook interface and discuss future direction, such as, real-time reinforcement learning for personalized interventions.
About the presenters: Nasir Ali has a diverse research background from software engineering to mobile health (mHealth) and IoT space since 2009. His work has been published in top journals (Transactions in Software Engineering and Empirical Software Engineering). In 2016, he joined MD2K to conduct research and develop cloud-based solutions (i.e. Cerebral Cortex), standardization of mHealth sensor metadata, data analysis/modeling pipelines, and visualization layers to support high-frequency mobile sensor big data management, analysis, and producing actionable results. Nasir is the core developer of Cerebral Cortex.
Tim Hnat began working in mobile health (mHealth) and IoT space in 2008, publishing multiple papers in ACM SenSys. He works as an assistant professor of Computer Science from 2012 when he initiated a kinematic sensing project (K-Sense) that utilized motion tracking bands to target obesity and diabetes. This work led to his selection as an mHealth scholar as part of the prestigious, annual NIH mHealth Summer Institute in 2013 and returned in 2019 as a faculty instructor. Based on this experience, Tim was recruited in 2014 to become the chief software architect for the University of Memphis-based NIH Center of Excellence on Mobile Sensor Data-to-Knowledge (MD2K). In this role, Tim oversees the development of both mCerebrum and Cerebral Cortex and their deployment across 11 states in the US for high-frequency sensor data collection in research studies. He also supports the usage of these data for computational modeling by computing researchers and population-scale analysis by health researchers. He supervises a team of four software engineers, three with doctoral degrees.
