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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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