<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=us-ascii"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class=""><span class="" style="font-size: 16px;">Dear 3DEM and CCPEM list members,</span></div><span class="" style="font-size: 16px;"><div class=""><span class="" style="font-size: 16px;"><br class=""></span></div>The Assessment Phase of the EMDataBank Map Challenge is now officially open, and all are welcome to participate.</span><br class="" style="font-size: 16px;"><br class="" style="font-size: 16px;"><span class="" style="font-size: 16px;">The Challenge Phase (July 2015-Apr 2016) was a tremendous success, with 66 submitted maps spread across the 7 image data benchmark targets. </span><b class="" style="font-size: 16px;">We recognize the significant time commitment required and are grateful to the 27 challengers who contributed their efforts and made their results available for analysis.</b><br class="" style="font-size: 16px;"><br class="" style="font-size: 16px;"><span class="" style="font-size: 16px;">Following review, the challenge data and files are now publicly available to assessors. The authors of the entries and the software used have been suppressed to promote a blind assessment. We welcome input from the assessors as to how to most usefully evaluate these results. For example, assessment/comparison methods could include statistical analyses, resolution estimation, or fitting of atomic models. Some suggestions are provided on the website but these are not meant to be prescriptive. </span><br class="" style="font-size: 16px;"><br class="" style="font-size: 16px;"><span class="" style="font-size: 16px;">During this next phase, assessors are strongly encouraged to share their plans and submit short summaries of their results. We will end the blind assessment phase in mid February 2017. We then plan to present and discuss the results of the assessment more fully at a workshop currently proposed for some time in Spring 2017. Our goal is also to solicit manuscript submissions for a special issue to a suitable journal.</span><br class="" style="font-size: 16px;"><br class="" style="font-size: 16px;"><span class="" style="font-size: 16px;">Please visit the </span><a href="http://challenges.emdatabank.org/?q=2015_map_challenge" class="" style="font-size: 16px;">map challenge overview page</a><span class="" style="font-size: 16px;"> for more information and participation links.</span><div class=""><span class="" style="font-size: 16px;"><a href="http://challenges.emdatabank.org/?q=2015_map_challenge" class="">http://challenges.emdatabank.org/?q=2015_map_challenge</a></span><br class="" style="font-size: 16px;"><span class="" style="font-size: 16px;"> </span><div class="" style="font-size: 16px;">Sincerely, </div><div class="" style="font-size: 16px;">Cathy Lawson on behalf of the Map Challenge Committee</div></div></body></html>