roadmap

Where Open Problems is headed.

A community-driven platform grows continuously. Below is what we've shipped, what we're building now, and the directions we're exploring, separated honestly so the picture survives scrutiny.

status ShippedIn progressPlannedExploring
2020 to 2022 Shipped

Foundations

The project is founded; the first tasks, the Viash + Nextflow stack, and the NeurIPS 2021 multimodal competition establish the model.

  • First task definitions & control methods
  • NeurIPS 2021 multimodal competition
  • Reproducible component framework
2022 to 2024 Shipped

Scale & rigor

The platform matures into a continuously-run living benchmark with a standardized dataset pipeline and public leaderboards.

  • Standardized AnnData dataset pipeline
  • Continuous leaderboards on the website
  • NeurIPS 2023 perturbation competition to OP3
2025 In progress

Foundation-model benchmarking (MVP)

Bring single-cell foundation models into the platform and evaluate them on established downstream tasks.

  • Integrate SCimilarity, scGPT, UCE, Geneformer & scPRINT
  • Evaluate on Batch Integration, Label Projection & Perturbation Prediction
  • Publish a white paper / preprint on results
2025 to early 2026 In progress

Experience & infrastructure

Make the platform easier to use and to build on, and harden the core infrastructure.

  • Python package for quick local evaluation
  • Partial results for long-running methods; local preview of figures & QC
  • Data-lineage tracking and SpatialData support
  • Switch between cloud providers; DB schema refactor
2025 & beyond Planned

Global community & impact

Grow a global community, translate benchmark insights into practice, and keep infrastructure cost-effective.

  • Global meetings, onboarding & support
  • Link dataset characteristics to method performance; publish guidelines
  • Annual hackathon (~50 people, ~6 topics)
  • API clients & a web client
Exploring

Aspirational & forward-looking

Directions we're actively interested in but haven't committed to a timeline for, shaped by what new contributors bring.

Extension into new biological & computational domains as contributors add tasks
Deeper foundation-model evaluation across the full task battery
An interactive results-exploration interface
One-click deployment of the OP workbench (e.g. Google Colab)
New tasks in flight: spatial segmentation, iST preprocessing, cytometry integration, spatial simulators, differential expression, GRN inference

Want to shape what's next?

Join a hackathon, propose a task, or contribute a method. The roadmap is set in the open.