Commercial Applications of Connectomics?

[mrjiaruiwang]

What would be some industrial applications of connectomics? Would we be able to eventually develop mind reading? Lie detection? Or possibly identifying regions of target for electromagnetic stimulation therapy for mental conditions?

[ElanHR]

I'd imagine down the road the most immediate application would be something similar to 23AndMe where people could get screened for dispositions towards various conditions.

[dlee138]

I would think that it would screen for more than just medical conditions like schizophrenia. Perhaps in the future, we could screen brains and see what kind of personality/talents/traits a person has based on their connectomes. For example, they might scan your brain and go "this person has potential to be a good at music" or "this person is likely to have neurotic personality."

[imichaelnorris]

In Computer Science, I hope knowledge of connectomics will be able to feed into developing better learning algorithms, which would lead to lots of industrial applications like finance, data science, etc. Even if there were no industrial applications, though, I think that connectomics is a noble thing to better understand. But industrial applications are definitely positive, as they can influence investment in connectomics as a whole.

[whock]

One application is using graph theory to exploit social networks for, e.g., targeted advertising. Below is a conference abstract [1] on using population subgroups in social media to better aim advertisements at consumers. A similar (and surprisingly old - 1984) study [2] used graph theory to better define interpersonal networks and understand brand preference and loyalty through these graph studies. So advertising seems like a clear use of graph theoretic tools in industry.

[1] http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=1579567&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D1579567

[2] http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2489067?sid=21105591160771&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&uid=3739808

[DSP137]

I'm not sure about mind-reading, but I know there have been studies done rather recently (2013) regarding creating false memories/associations in mice. Here's a link: http://www.sciencemag.org.proxy1.library.jhu.edu/content/341/6144/387.full.pdf?sid=5053aad2-60c0-43b2-88fc-1a642e96f51c You may have to be logged into the library's website via your jhed login to access it.

[ajulian3]

Operations Research would definitely follow under some form of connectomics. Specifically, isn't time series based operations research a form of connectomics in that geographic proximity along with time act as two variables in terms of path optimization? Moreover, another aspect in which connectomics is related to an industrial application would definitely be in spatial analysis (i.e. geographical information systems). ArcGIS software program helps store all geographic related information.

[mblohr]

How about digital currency analysis applications, such as bitcoin transaction graph analysis: http://people.csail.mit.edu/spillai/data/papers/bitcoin-transaction-graph-analysis.pdf