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Yaroslav Halchenko

Full name

Yaroslav Halchenko

Affiliation

Dartmouth College, Psychology and Brain Sciences Department

Address

Hanover
United States

Email

site-incf(at)onerussian.com

Home page

http://haxbylab.dartmouth.edu/ppl/yarik.html

Phone

Office: +1 (603) 646-9834

Research Areas

  • General neuroinformatics
  • Neuroimaging
  • Infrastructural and portal services

Keywords

fMRI, Machine learning, PyMVPA, NeuroDebian

Research focus

Developing new and formalizing existing analysis methodologies and software solutions in the domain of computational and cognitive neuroscience.

Research description

Research focus

With the goal of contributing to our understanding of the brain function, I am interested in developing new and formalizing existing analysis methodologies and software solutions in the domain of computational and cognitive neuroscience.

Contemporary instrumental methods, such as MRI and EEG, deliver us tremendous amounts of data reflecting undergoing neural processes. To better understand functioning of the brain, it is necessary not only to increase computational capacities but also to develop adequate methodologies and software infrastructure. To address the primary high-level question of How does brain processes, encodes and represents information? I am investigating How could we decode neural processes and their organization at different spatial and temporal scales given available instrumentation? What research questions and findings are adequate given experimental designs and acquired data? How developed methodologies could be made available in a way suitable for quick adoption by the research community?

Research projects

Seeking for the answers to above questions I have tackled problems of multimodal (e.g. EEG/fMRI) data analysis [HHP05], visual perception [HH08], large-scale decoding of the mental states [PHH09], and causal structure inference [RHH+10]. To streamline my own analysis and to help other researchers with answering former questions, I have joined the efforts with Michael Hanke to develop PyMVPA [HHS+09a] - a flexible and versatile Python platform for the analysis of neural data through employing recent advances in statistical learning methods. It is really inspiring to see the PyMVPA being used productively by hundreds of researchers around the globe.

To address the later question of software deployment, methods popularization and results reproducibility in neuroscience, together with the same old Michael Hanke we founded the NeuroDebian project. Relying on and contributing back to the Debian project, we equip neuroscience research community with a free, reliable and versatile research platform. Nowadays Debian and its derivatives are used by thousands of researchers as their main operating systems. The NeuroDebian repository became for them the ultimate source of recent developments in neuroscience software and canonical datasets necessary for their day-to-day research.

Quote

Open-sourcing is important for the same reasons regardless of the domain: improving understanding and fixing "bugs".

INCF activities
Profile updated: 2011-08-17
Neuroinformatics People Directory