DeepLabCut receives an EOSS award and launch an AI Residency Program
© 2021 DeepLabCut
The DeepLabCut developed by the Mackenzie Mathis Laboratory and the Alexander Mathis Group, both at EPFL have recieved support from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) through the Essential Open Source Software for Science (EOSS) program and have now been awarded a new round of funding for 2021-2023 through EOSS Cycle 4. Moreover, they also received funding to establish a DeepLabCut AI Residency program.
New EOSS Cycle 4 Funding
The team is extremely thankful to CZI for providing them continued funding to support one of our core-developers (Dr. Jessy Lauer), and this funding will also help them to grow the team with a new community manager. Stay tuned for a job posting soon on their website.
DeepLabCut AI Residency Program
The aim of this funding is to establish a new DeepLabCut AI Residency Program for underrepresented groups. DeepLabCut is used for research in a growing range of fields: from animal conservation, to biomechanics, to neuroscience. Many end users do not have formal training in computer science, deep learning, or experience with best-practices in programming.
To help ease this gap and train the next-gen, they will now establish a new program to host paid AI Residents exclusively selected from groups underrepresented in computer science. The goal of this DeepLabCut AI Residency will be to train and empower students to use and modify code, develop new add-ons, and become leaders within the DeepLabCut consortium and the open source community more broadly. To this end, the Residency Program will aim to recruit both more experienced users and novice users -- by having a mixture of backgrounds (both in terms of lived experiences and work experiences) working together, they hope to provide a nurturing environment where students can both learn more about DeepLabCut, open source practices, and develop new skills, while at the same time enabling them to contribute. The program will run as a 10 week AI Residency during the summer of 2022, 2023, and hopefully beyond.