Learning from learning machines: a new generation of AI technology to meet the needs of science

We outline emerging opportunities and challenges to enhance the utility of AI for scientific discovery. The distinct goals of AI for industry versus the goals of AI for science create tension between identifying patterns in data versus discovering patterns in the world from data. If we address the fundamental challenges associated with "bridging the gap" between domain-driven scientific models and data-driven AI learning machines, then we expect that these AI models can transform hypothesis generation, scientific discovery, and the scientific process itself.

ICLabel: An automated electroencephalographic independent component classifier, dataset, and website

The electroencephalogram (EEG) provides a non-invasive, minimally restrictive, and relatively low cost measure of mesoscale brain dynamics with high temporal resolution. Although signals recorded in parallel by multiple, near-adjacent EEG scalp electrode channels are highly-correlated and combine signals from many different sources, biological and non-biological, independent component analysis (ICA) has been shown to isolate the various source generator processes underlying those recordings. Independent components (IC) found by ICA decomposition can be manually inspected, selected, and interpreted, but doing so requires both time and practice as ICs have no particular order or intrinsic interpretations and therefore require further study of their properties. Alternatively, sufficiently-accurate automated IC classifiers can be used to classify ICs into broad source categories, speeding the analysis of EEG studies with many subjects and enabling the use of ICA decomposition in near-real-time applications. While many such classifiers have been proposed recently, this work presents the ICLabel project comprised of (1) an IC dataset containing spatiotemporal measures for over 200,000 ICs from more than 6,000 EEG recordings, (2) a website for collecting crowdsourced IC labels and educating EEG researchers and practitioners about IC interpretation, and (3) the automated ICLabel classifier. The classifier improves upon existing methods in two ways: by improving the accuracy of the computed label estimates and by enhancing its computational efficiency. The ICLabel classifier outperforms or performs comparably to the previous best publicly available method for all measured IC categories while computing those labels ten times faster than that classifier as shown in a rigorous comparison against all other publicly available EEG IC classifiers.