SNU Connectome Laboratory — Lab Homepage

Official website of the Connectome Laboratory at Seoul National University (PI: Prof. Jiook Cha / 차지욱 교수).

🔗 Website: https://www.connectomelab.com/ 🏛️ Affiliations: Department of Psychology • Interdisciplinary Program in AI (IPAI) • Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS)

"Everything Connects to Everything Else." — Leonardo da Vinci

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Design

Warm, editorial, people-first — a "bright museum with one dark projection room": the site runs on a paper-toned light theme (Hahmlet serif display / Pretendard body / IBM Plex Mono captions), with a single deep-ink band hosting the interactive 3D connectome sketch. Member photos, alumni destinations, and lab-life stories carry the warmth; the cyan accent carries the lab's technical identity.

Features

1. 🧠 Interactive Connectome Sketch (three.js)

   • An illustrative 3D visualization of the brain networks the lab studies (labeled as a sketch, not anatomical data). Nodes link to real lab projects.

2. 📚 Publication Archive (auto-synced)

   • scripts/sync_scholar.py pulls the record (102 entries, 76 of them peer-reviewed, 2008–present) from the OpenAlex API with cursor pagination. It classifies each entry as journal / conference / workshop / preprint, excludes conference-abstract supplements and errata, fuzzy-dedups preprint-vs-journal versions of the same paper, and highlights authors from a member allowlist rather than by surname.

3. ⚡ Research Radar (weekly arXiv scan)

   • scripts/update_research_radar.py sweeps arXiv weekly across seven topic buckets, each with its own query and quota: brain foundation models for fMRI and for EEG (kept apart so neither starves the other), gene & brain, affective & developmental, agentic AI applied to brain research, quantum ML, and brain-LLM alignment. A paper's topic is the bucket that surfaced it.
   • Broad buckets over-fetch and narrow through two gates: a neuro-term match on title+abstract, then the summarizer's own 0-1 labRelevanceScore (entries below 0.4 are never written).
   • Summaries are generated with Gemini via OpenRouter when OPENROUTER_API_KEY is set; otherwise an honestly-labeled abstract excerpt is used. Every record carries a generatedBy field surfaced in the UI.
   • RADAR_DRY_RUN=1 prints each bucket's query URL and candidate counts without writing; ARXIV_CACHE=<file> replays a saved feed offline.

4. 💡 AI Idea Lab (/ideas)

   • scripts/generate_research_ideas.py feeds the lab's research areas, recent publications, and radar trends to Gemini, which proposes weekly research hypotheses (hypothesis / rationale / first experiment / risks).
   • Trends reach the prompt round-robin across topics, so one prolific bucket cannot decide what the whole page is about. Each run publishes at most one idea per category, and an idea is rejected when the same radar paper has already been mined for that category — the failure mode that once produced three foundation-models ideas from a single paper.
   • Published unedited with a fixed "AI-generated, not lab-endorsed" disclaimer and the exact model id on every card. No LLM key → nothing is generated (no fake fallback, by design).

5. 💬 Lab Guide (curated FAQ)

   • A floating guide answering common questions about research, admissions, and lab culture from a hand-written FAQ. It is intentionally not presented as a live AI — the site is fully static.

6. 👥 People-first content

   • Member profiles with photos, education, research interests, and passions; alumni tracked with their current positions; news and history archives.

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Tech Stack

• Framework: Astro 5.x (static site generation)
• UI: React 18, three.js, Tailwind CSS (+ typography, animate), Lucide
• Content: type-safe Astro content collections (Zod schemas) in src/content/
• Pipelines: Python 3.11 (stdlib only) — OpenAlex API, arXiv API, OpenRouter/Gemini (optional)
• CI/CD & Hosting: GitHub Pages + GitHub Actions (deploy.yml, research-radar.yml)

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Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Node.js v18.20+, v20.3+, or v22+
• Python 3.10+ (for the sync scripts)

Development

git clone https://github.com/Transconnectome/lab-homepage.git
cd lab-homepage
npm ci
npm run dev        # http://localhost:4321

Build & Preview

npm run build
npm run preview

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Content Pipelines

Publications sync (OpenAlex)

python3 scripts/sync_scholar.py

Research Radar (arXiv, optional LLM synthesis)

export OPENROUTER_API_KEY="sk-or-v1-..."   # optional; falls back to labeled excerpts
python3 scripts/update_research_radar.py

Weekly automation

.github/workflows/research-radar.yml runs both scripts every Monday, validates the generated content with a full npm run build before committing, and deploys the built site in the same workflow (a GITHUB_TOKEN push cannot trigger deploy.yml, so the deploy happens in-workflow).

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Languages & routing

Korean is the default language and lives at the root; English is under /en/.

	Korean	English
Home	/	/en/
Research	/research	/en/research

UI strings live in src/i18n/ui.ts; page content is chosen by a lang field on each content entry (*-ko.md files carry lang: "ko"). Every page emits hreflang alternates with Korean as x-default. The site previously served Korean under /ko/, so those paths are kept alive as redirects declared in astro.config.mjs.

Korean typography is not simply Latin typography with different glyphs — see src/styles/global.css, where word-break: keep-all, negative display tracking, and the :lang(ko) overrides are documented with the reasons.

Custom Domain & GitHub Pages

1. Repository Settings → Pages: Source = GitHub Actions; Custom domain = www.connectomelab.com with Enforce HTTPS.
2. DNS: CNAME record www → transconnectome.github.io.

The DNS cutover from the old Google Sites page is done and the site is live. scripts/cutover.sh --status reports the current DNS, custom-domain and certificate state at any time.

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Contact

• PI: Prof. Jiook Cha (차지욱) — connectome@snu.ac.kr · +82-2-880-8618
• Lab: Office M512, Building 16, Seoul National University
• © 2026 SNU Connectome Lab. All rights reserved.