What I learned from organizing NeuroTechHa’s first hackathon
We started NeuroTechHa, NeuroTechX’s Hamilton local chapter, back in the summer of 2017. We always knew we would eventually organize a hackathon. We even planned all the chapter’s activities around this event. The end goal: to engage Hamilton’s tech community and equip them with the necessary skills and knowledge to develop neurotech-related products. We originally scheduled the event for Summer 2018 and preparations started on February of that year. There were many hurdles along the way; the date was pushed back twice and we nearly cancelled the event, but finally the hackathon took place at Hamilton’s CoMotion on King during the third week of November. After a successful weekend of hacking, networking, and learning, I felt the need to share a couple of thoughts and things I learned with the NeuroTechX community. So, that’s the objective of this short essay: I want to share the things I learned during NeuroTechHa’s 2018 Hackathon.
Our hackathon provided a space for people with different academic backgrounds and skill sets to develop neurotechnology projects, and engage key neurotechnology stakeholders in conversation. On the first night, we opened the floor for the attendees to share their product and project ideas. Not one single person put any projects forward. As we had foreseen this, we prepared 5 base projects for attendees to hack — projects ranging from big data and data science (we provided an EEG motor imagery set and one with multiple data from children with epilepsy) to hardware-based projects (developing a gelling system for research EEG caps). We soon realized the reason why no one proposed any projects was because there was still a huge misunderstanding of what neurotechnology is (and isn’t), mainly because we advertised the hackathon widely, attracting an audience that was broader than our usual hacknight community. After the hackathon, however, our hacknights had at least three times as many people as before! So, I learned two big things from this: hosting workshops and hacknights leading up to big events will help get people up to speed, and if you (like us) are in a smaller city at the early stages of the chapter, it might be helpful to hold a big event and then leverage the momentum to solidify the community. After the event, make sure to quickly follow up with both workshops and hacknights to keep the fire going.
A recurring topic throughout the event was the idea of “bridges”. On the second day of the Hackathon, we organized a panel titled “Neurotechnology: Bridging the gap between academia and industry”. During the panel, our main industry partner (Dr. Graeme Moffat from InteraXon) had the chance to interact with local clinicians as well as some of the leading researchers in the field of Brain Computer Interfaces (Dr. Sue Becker and Dr. Kiret Dhindsa). What struck me the most from this panel was how disconnected clinical practice, research, and industry are: one of the clinicians shared with us how she spent months trying to figure out how to fix her homemade neurofeedback device because she did not know what a “Fourier Transform” is (for the non-digital signal processing people, Fourier’s theorem is the foundation of modern digital signal processing techniques). Academia and industry also seem to be far apart: though we have made advancements with neurotechnology in the lab, how readily can we democratize and make available these findings to the general community remain to be seen. NeuroTechX, as a community, has a unique opportunity here. Because our aim is to include everyone in the conversation surrounding neurotechnology, we can help bridge relationships between academia, industry, and clinical practice. After this, I came to the conclusion that NeuroTechX chapters should pick up two kinds of projects: either (1) take neurotech research paradigms and replicate them with consumer-grade headsets (i.e. what is the minimum amount of electrodes and presentations needed for a successful P300 speller?) or (2) reach out to local clinicians, get them to engage with the community, and help them implement neurotech tools in their practice. Taking neurotechnology out of the academic silos and into both the consumer space and clinical practice will help us democratize neurotechnology and start having the impact that we want.
Diversity is important — now give me a chance to explain what I mean. The diversity of the team (skin colour, sexual orientation, gender expression, and areas of expertise) will be reflected in the effectiveness and the greatness of the team’s solution/product. Around 10% of our attendees were women, and around 20% of our attendees did not have an engineering or tech background. These small percentages are not ideal by any standard. Usually, when doing an engineering or tech-related degree, we are equipped with a myriad of very useful tools. We are great at providing solutions and answers. When developing a product, however, providing a good fix is only half of the job: asking the right questions is equally as important. And that is exactly where the humanities and science fields can have significant input, by asking the right questions. Diverse teams will develop excellent products. And it can actually get really tricky to get diverse people with diverse backgrounds on board to hackathons. Hackathons have been associated with a particular kind of people and activities, creating an environment that might not seem welcoming to everyone. For example, one of the attendees, a woman doing a PhD in neuroscience, mentioned to us that she didn’t feel comfortable with participating because she thought she had “nothing to offer”. Her project ended up being in the top three solutions. How to get more diverse people with varying backgrounds to participate in our events remains an open question. NeuroTechHa is still trying to come up with ways in which we can attract a more diverse crowd to the table. Of course, I acknowledge that whatever solution we come up with will be a superficial fix for deeper problems at play (i.e., homophobic, transphonic, racist, and mysoginistic practices in the tech community), but we have to start somewhere. We’ve discussed two ideas so far to tackle these issues: go over the code of conduct right at the beginning of our events (or make it more visible to everyone) so everyone understands that hate speech will not be tolerated. We’ve also discussed the idea of reframing the concept of the Hackathon into something that encompasses more disciplines, i.e., naming it an “Innovation Sprint” or even advertising it slightly different. In any case, if you have any ideas in how we can achieve this, feel free to contact us (hector@neurotechx.com).
The last set of things I learned during that weekend relate to the details of organizing a hackathon. We spent 9 months organizing this. If you ask me now, I would have started at least one year in advance. We contacted around 100 companies for sponsorship. Most of them did not agree to sponsor us mostly because they had already allocated sponsorship money to other projects, or because of how late we came into the picture. Organizing a hackathon is not a trivial endeavour: doing things with time will ensure that you get enough funding for all the event. Choosing a venue is also key: a venue that is well suited for a hackathon will give people enough space without it being too big, and modularity to change it at will (aim for a place with lots of chairs and tables, well lit…). Another thing that really worked out for us was having several mentoring sessions throughout the event. We provided three rounds of mentoring: an informal one and two formal ones. On the first night, after people chose a project and divided themselves into groups, my co-president, Saurabh, and I went around providing informal mentoring and feedback to all the groups, so we could help them both formalize and ground their ideas (i.e., is this idea actually feasible with the current state of technology?). The “formal” mentoring sessions included several people from our industry, academic, and clinical partners (clinicians, McMaster University and Mohawk college teachers and researchers, industry partners…). Most of the teams gave us very positive feedback regarding these sessions. Bottom line: mentors will provide knowledge and feedback that can help steer a given product or a solution to a more realistic and achievable path. This will help the teams avoid wasting time on products that are already out there, ideas that are not necessarily scalable or marketable, or using sub-ideal technical choices (i.e. the wrong Machine Learning algorithm, filter…).
Organizing this Hackathon was one of the most challenging and most rewarding experiences in my life. It was about 3 more times the work I thought it’d be (I’d say around 2–3 hours per week over 8–9 months) but about 5 times more rewarding. The night before the event I promised myself I would not take on these kinds of projects ever again; however, after the last day, we were already discussing next year’s hackathon. Seeing all these people work tirelessly towards a common goal really renewed my own passion and commitment to this field. Next time you organize a big event for your local tech community, remember this: start one year earlier, really make sure the community understands the field and what they are getting into, and get everyone to the table.
