Nicola Pezzotti

Scientist, Engineer and Leader in
Artificial Intelligence, Visual Analytics and Computer Science

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OpenWorm: A Digital Organism In Your Browser

12 May 2014 The kickstarter founding campaing is coming to an end for the OpenWorm project.



You may ask, "what is OpenWorm?".
"OpenWorm is an open science project aimed at building the first digital organism, a microscopic worm called C. elegans. With this KickStarter we want you to join us in contributing to the creation of the first digital organism and we want to give you your own WormSim to play with on your web browser. Your WormSim will improve over time and will get smarter as our model gets better and closer to the real one."

"Science still does not understand the human brain to the level needed to cure diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Believe it or not, science doesn’t even fully understand the brain of a simple worm! If we cannot build a computer model of a worm, the most studied organism in all of biology, we don’t stand a chance to understand something as complex as the human brain."

I found this project really interesting and all the code is available on GitHub! (I'm actually planning to contribute to it). It's a very cool mix of different technologies and programming languages, from OpenCL for the GPGPU to OpenGL, WebGL and ThreeJS for the visualization with a lot of C++/Java/Python in the middle.



With less than a week left for the founding campaign and more than 80k$ to be pledged we have to spread the word as widely as possible!