Daniel D. Lee, Tisch University Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell Tech, has won the FlyWire Ventral Nerve Cord (VNC) Matching Challenge award for a competition that tasked researchers with creating a method to align the connectomes — aka neural connection maps — of male and female fruit flies, represented as large graphs.

To find the best way to match the “nodes” (neurons) of the graphs, Lee’s team, named “Old School,” utilized matrix representations. Matrix representations are ways to organize data using matrices, which are rectangular arrays of numbers arranged in rows and columns. Specifically, Lee analyzed doubly-stochastic and permutation matrices, which are special types of square, nonnegative matrices, allowing his team to develop a winning solution.

Lee and his teammate, senior researcher Lawrence Saul of the Flatiron Institute, presented their solution to the FlyWire challenge at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute on March 7. FlyWire is a global initiative that combines human expertise and AI to construct a detailed map of the neural pathways and connections in fruit fly brains, striving to advance research in neurobiology.

Read more on the Cornell Tech website.