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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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