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EuroSciPy, the cross-disciplinary gathering focused on the use and development of the Python language in scientific research, is organized for the fourth year in a row, and is growing steadily. New for this year is the organization of two satellite conferences, centered around Python use in the physics and neuroscience communities.  

The Python in Neuroscience workshop aims at bringing together researchers who develop software tools in different branches of neuroscience in order to share ideas, concepts, tools and to foster collaborative projects based on Python language. The organizers are asking for contributions in the form of a one page abstract, and submission is open until June 8. 

Possible topics for contributions include large parts of the neuroinformatics field:

• tools for neural simulation
• electrophysiology data analysis
• data management and databasing in neuroimaging and neuroscience
• stimulus generation
• neuroimaging data processing
• workflows and pipelines for data processing
• massive computation facilities for simulation and data analysis in neuroscience
• visualization tools in neuroscience and neuroimaging

Read more on the workshop web page, http://pythonneuro.sciencesconf.org/, or contact the organizers on pythonneuro@sciencesconf.org.

So why has the Python language reached such a prominent position in the neuroscience field? Dr. Raphael Ritz,  INCF Scientific Officer and involved in the organization of the workshop, explains:

"Python is a simple yet powerful, fully object-oriented, open source scripting and programming language. Lead by the increased maturity of 'numpy' and 'scipy' in particular, it has become a serious competitor as a platform for scientific computing. Consequently, more and more neuroscience labs and projects are switching to Python for managing their computational tasks - be it data acquisition or analysis, stimulus generation or delivery, visualization or animation, modeling or simulation etc. Due to Python being open source and platform independent it is also easy to share code across laboratories and groups which has let to a flourishing ecosystem of libraries and tools tailored to tasks as found in doing neuroscience research."

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The Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) have announced the implementation of a new programme for joint funding of German-Japanese cooperative research in computational neuroscience.

Citing from the call text: "This initiative focuses on the funding of collaborative research projects that bring together scientists and engineers with complementary experience and training in the experimental and theoretical neurosciences. Proposals for research projects should describe collaborations that bring together the complementary expertise needed to achieve significant advances on challenging interdisciplinary problems. They should include collaborations among computational and/or modelling experts, theorists, and experimental neuroscientists or engineers. Computational research supported under this initiative must relate to biological processes and should lead to hypotheses that are testable in biological studies."

The application deadline is August 8, 2011.

Read more in the Funding section

Image: "Neuroinformatics" by Hannes Lüling, Clara Lüling and Thomas Biller, from the INCF Image Competition 2010.

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