Any person with experience sorting microwire recordings may enter the results of their spike sorting of the contest dataset (available at the Center for Open Science). No formal training is required though without significant experience you are not likely to win. Only one submission per person is allowed.
Any type of spike sorting technique or program may be used. If sorting involves manual choices or changes of any kind, the manual steps must be described at least generally below.
The results submitted must provide the times of occurrence of each waveform event and a cluster label for each event in each channel in the dataset. If only some clusters are to be considered single unit activity and included in scoring, a table labelling each cluster must also be included. If you wish to compete for the prize for identifying which channels are real recordings, you must submit a table indicating for each channel whether it is real or simulated.
The file format of the results may be any commonly used format in the field; however, formats which can be read by the NeuralEnsemble Neo library are preferred. Output formats from the commonly used KlustKwik, Combinato, OSort, or WaveClus are readily understood. If a table is needed, a tab separated value file with a header line is preferred.
All files for a submission should be included in a single archive (.zip, .tar, .tar.gz) using this upload button if less than 200 MB. If greater than this size, please upload the archive to DropBox at NMSSC Dropbox with your desired file name and list the file name below.
