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The Society for Neuroscience celebrated its annual meeting from 14 to 18th October, in New Orleans, US. As in previous years, INCF offered a series of dual demo sessions of Neuroinformatics tools and software (short demo videos are available  on the INCF YouTube Channel). An open mini-hackathon took place on Wednesday, were developers were welcome to join for on-site coding and discussion. The INCF DATASPACE was launched during SfN, along with the Data Share Award. INCF was located near other Neuroinformatics exhibitors like Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF), Whole Brain Catalogue, Cognitive Atlas, CARMEN and NeuroDevian.

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Last July, INCF travelled to Barcelona to participate in the Federation of European Neurosciences - FENS-  Meeting. INCF had a large booth where demo sessions took place. On Sunday, Andrey Sobolev introduced guests and attendees to the G-Node Tools and Services for Electrophyisiology Data. On Monday  Daniel K. Wójcik (left) presented the 3D Brain Atlas Reconstructor and Scalable Brain Atlas. Attendees were able as well to learn about each INCF Program and meet the Tasks Forces members and Secretariat.  On Wednesday, everybody was welcome to present and discuss their own neuroinformatics work. 

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As in previous years, the INCF exhibit booth at the annual SfN meeting was well attended. Our co-location (see map) with other neuroinformatics projects and initiatives helps - visitors interested in our activities are likely interested in our booth neighbors, and vice versa - and probably also our hosted program of live neuroinformatics demos. (Though we suspect that our comfy sofa might also be a contributing factor.)

This year we added a satellite workshop to our schedule, "Neuroshare revisited" on November 12, for a discussion on the state of Neuroshare and possible future developments to the format in order to improve and facilitate access to neurophysiological data. It was organized through the INCF Program on Standards for Datasharing, and we invited data acquisition system vendors, data analysis software developers, and users to talk about needs and problems - it turned out to be a very interesting discussion. The group agreed that extending Neuroshare would be a worthwhile endeavor. 

We devoted a full day of our neuroinformatics demo program to digital brain atlasing. Representatives from the INCF Program on Digital Brain Atlasing held a "Walk-in Registration Clinic" for researchers with rodent data and an interest in sharing them through the Program's infrastructure. We were even visited by George Paxinos (yes, that Paxinos)! 

Our other two scientific programs were also represented - the Program on Ontologies of Neural Structures through the "Adopt a Neuron" campaign which was also presented in our booth during a demo, and the Program on Multiscale Modeling through a demo of a reference implementation in progress for NineML (the Network Interchange for Neuroscience ML). And there were many other interesting demo contributions from Programs, Nodes and the scientific community - you can see them all here.

This dazzling array of new information - posters, lectures, exhibitors and a constant flow of brief tweeted updates - and many interactions with scientific community from all over the world is what makes the SfN week one of the high points of our year, and this year was no exception.  Unfortunately, there is never any way to see all that is potentially interesting at SfN. But some key lectures have been saved for posterity in video format on  SfN's YouTube channel - for instance the Kavli minisymposium on legal implications of neuroscience advances. 

James Gee, Ilya Zaslavsky, George Paxinos and Luis Ibanez.

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Abstract Book

We have just made the 2011 Abstract book, with abstracts for all keynotes, workshops, demos and posters, available as a pdf for browsing and download (including a handy clickable index at the end!)

Satellite Workshop on September 3

The Congress kicks off already September 3 with the satellite workshop "Toward a Global Neuroinformatics Infrastructure" organized in collaboration with the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society at their yearly meeting EMBC, held at the Boston Marriott Copley Place Hotel. The workshop will include presentations from the leaders of large neuroscience infrastructure projects from around the world: 

Main meeting September 4-6

The main meeting will feature 5 keynote lectures, 8 spotlight presentations of selected demos and posters, 12 workshop speakers, 35 demos and and 130 posters, as well as the INCF US Node Special Symposium (with another 9 lectures) on the afternoon of the last meeting day, September 6. The same day, September 6, also offers lunch seminars sponsored by BIRN. All details can be found on the meeting web pages.

INCF Task Force meetings September 7-8

Taking advantage of the fact that a large part of our community is present in Boston, after the main meeting we are also organizing meetings for many of the Task Forces associated with the INCF Scientific Programs, including a cross-Task Force hackathon at MIT on September 8.

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We can now, based on empirical testing in the form of the CNS*2011 reception, conclude that the Stockholm City Hall is just about a comfortable fit for some five hundred mingling conference attendees - where they fit the additional eight hundred people at the 1300-guest Nobel banquet will remain a mystery.

CNS*2011 attendees in the Stockholm City Hall's Golden Hall.

One of the high points of the CNS*2011 meeting are the poster sessions - this year, almost four hundred posters were presented in three intense poster sessions. 

Among the work presented we found one of the first posters produced from the EuroSPIN Erasmus Mundus program, which offers joint doctoral degrees in neuroinformatics and is offered by a consortium consisting of four universities in INCF member countries: National Centre for Biological Science, Bangalore, India; University of Edinburgh, UK; Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg, Germany, and KTH in Sweden . We also found a poster on CoCoMac 2.0, a macaque brain atlas with an interface built on the INCF Scalable Brain Atlas.

Left: Oliver Muthmann, EuroSPIN PhD student, and Jeanette Hellgren Kotaleski, EuroSPIN Program Coordinator. Right: Rembrandt Bakker, explaining the CoCoMac 2.0 poster to Hermann Cuntz.

For the INCF Multiscale Modeling program, one of the most important events at CNS*2011 was the workshop Emerging standards in network modeling, which served as an update on the state of the art in the field, as well as the release of the initial version of the model description language NineML. Documentation and tutorials for NineML can be found at the INCF Software Center NineML pages.

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Stockholm at this time of year is at its most beautiful - and also at its emptiest, when many inhabitants are spending their vacations elsewhere. The 500+ conference attendees at CNS*2011, the second largest CNS conference ever, are certainly noticeable where they mill around on the campus of the Royal Institute of Technology, and they fill its largest lecture hall to the absolute limits.

Prof. Ivan Soltesz lectures in front of a full auditorium at CNS*2011

The meeting began yesterday, July 23rd, with tutorials - we filmed one of them, and hope to be able to make the material available within a few weeks, in collaboration with the OCNS. 

The main meeting days started today July 24th, with the "INCF Distinguished lecture" given by Dr Ivan Soltesz (and, as the name hints, sponsored by us), titled "Functional network connectivity of the control and epileptic hippocampus". He and his lab are working on some truly fascinating biological neural network studies with medical applications, combining experimental work and large-scale, anatomically and biophysically realistic modeling - for instance this recent PNAS study on the importance of "hubby" cells in the epileptic rat dentate gyrus, which shows how a small number of highly interconnected granule cells are able to change the dynamics of the network so that it becomes hyperexcitable and prone to epileptic seizures (see also the accompanying commentary by Dr Astrid Prinz). Several different probable candidates for such hub cells have been shown to exist.

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This Saturday, June 25, our summer conference season starts in earnest, with our satellite workshop on Neuroimaging Data Sharing and Data Access in Quebec, just before the launch of HBM*2011. The workshop has been greeted with much interest and is full - close to 100 attendees - with a waiting list. The following week, June 26-30, we will be present as exhibitors at HBM*2011, in booth 104.

Two weeks later, July 14-18, we will exhibit at the 8th IBRO World Congress of Neuroscience in Florence. Since we have recently become a member of IBRO, we are looking forward to meeting the IBRO community. Come meet us in booth 35!

Less than a week after IBRO, the CNS*2011 conference opens its doors in our hometown Stockholm. We have an exhibitor table, we are organizing a workshop on Emerging standards in network modeling on July 27, and we are also one of the local co-organizers - you'll meet us in various places during the conference days July 23-28.

After these three events, it is a month to go to the great finale - our own Neuroinformatics Congress in Boston, September 4-6. We are actually starting a day early, September 3, with a workshop during the last day of the EMBC conference; Toward a Global Neuroinformatics Infrastructure which includes talks by four world leaders of neuroinformatics and a concluding panel discussion. The registration fee for this last day of EMBC will be significantly discounted for Neuroinformatics Congress attendees.

And then? We start looking forward to meeting you all at SfN*2011 in Washington DC in November, of course. 

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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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