OpenWorm Annual Meeting 2025 (DevoWorm update)

Here are the slides for the DevoWorm group's report to the OpenWorm Annual Meeting (2024). You can watch Bradly Alicea present the talk on YouTube.

Thanks again to all of our contributors over the past year, all of our Github contributors, and all of our Google Summer of Code applicants. If you are interested in participating, join one of our meetings or contribute to our Github repo and organization.

Welcome to our Google Summer of Code scholars for 2025!

 

The Orthogonal Research and Education Laboratory is pleased to welcome three students to the lab as Google Summer of Code (GSoC) scholars. Two (Lalith Baru and Jayadratha Gayen) will be joining the DevoWorm group and one (Vidhi Rohira) will be joining the Open-source Sustainability project.

Lalith and Jayadratha will be working on different aspects of our DevoGraph project (Github). Lalith’s successful project proposal is called “NDP-HNN: Modelling Neural Developmental Programs of C. elegans Using Growing Hypergraph Neural Networks”, while Jayadratha’s successful project proposal is called “DevoTG: Dynamic Graph Neural Networks for Modeling C. elegans Development”. Good luck to both of them! They will be working with the DevoWorm group and active in our weekly meetings. They will also be hosted by the OpenWorm Foundation and contributing to their mission.

Vidhi will be contributing to OREL's Open-source Sustainability project (Github) by working at the intersection of Reinforcement Learning and Agent-based Modeling. Vidhi’s successful project proposal is called “SustainHub: Adaptive Agent-Based Model for Open-Source Community Sustainability”. Check out her updates as part of the Saturday Morning NeuroSim meeting series.

We have also invited our unsuccessful candidates to join our Open-source interest group. We host this meeting every Friday at 12 Noon Eastern time, and cover promoting open-source practices, project development, and project management education.

OpenWorm Annual Meeting 2024 (DevoWorm update)

 Here are the slides for the DevoWorm group's report to the OpenWorm Annual Meeting (2024). You can watch Bradly Alicea present the talk on YouTube.

Aside from all the great stuff going on in DevoWorm, there are two new tools being developed by Padraig Gleeson's team at University College London. First up is the Connectome Toolbox, which brings together multiple key datasets and visualization tools for C. elegans connectome analysis. The other is OpenWorm.ai, which uses a large language model (LLM) hosted on Huggingface to query information about C. elegans biology.

Here are some slides from the presentation. Click to enlarge. Thanks to Mehul Arora and Pakhi Banchalia for their Google Summer of Code efforts.

Google Summer of Code 2024

 

Welcome to the new Google Summer of Code scholars for 2024! INCF is sponsoring four students for which I (Bradly Alicea) am acting as mentor: two students for the DevoWorm group (via the OpenWorm Foundation community) and two students for the Orthogonal Research and Education Laboratory. 

D-GNNs (sponsored by the DevoWorm group)

Congratulations to Pakhi Banchalia and Mehul Arora for being accepted to work on the Developmental Graph Neural Networks (D-GNNs) project. Pakhi will be working on incorporating Neural Developmental Programs (NDPs) into GNN models. Mehul will be working on hypergraph techniques for developmental lineage trees and embryogenesis [1]. Himanshu Chougule (Google Summer of Code scholar) is a co-mentor for this project.

Virtual Reality for Research and Open-source Sustainability (sponsored by the Orthogonal Research and Education Lab)

Congratulations to Sarrah Bastawala for being accepted to work on the Open-source Sustainability project [2]. Sarrah is incorporating Large Language Models (LLMs) into the collection of agent-based approaches for this project. Jesse Parent is a co-mentor for this project.

We also have two Open-source Development scholars for Summer 2024: Adama Koita and Shubham Soni. They will be participating in the Orthogonal Lab's open-source weekly meetings in addition to projects based around Virtual Reality and Open-source Sustainability, respectively. 

OpenWorm Annual Meeting 2023 (DevoWorm update)

It's that time again -- time for the OpenWorm Annual meeting. Below are the slides I presented on progress and the latest activities in the DevoWorm group. If anything looks interesting to you, and you would like to contribute, please let me know. Click on any slide to enlarge.