On May 31^st, 8:15-10:00am EDT, follow the live webcast of the 2012 Kavli Prize laureates announcement by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in Oslo, and the World Science Festival in New York City. 

Members of the Neuron Registry Task Force, part of INCF's Program on Ontologies of Neural Structures, and NIF have published a Perspective article in Frontiers of Neuroinformatics. The paper describes the Neuron Registry initiative, and calls for the research community to adopt and develop comprehensive nomenclatures and descriptions for neurons.

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Beatriz Martin and Dr. Mathew Abrams have joined the Secretariat Staff as of May 2nd. Beatriz will be responsible for INCF Scientific Communications and Visualizations, and Mathew, as Program officer, will be responsible for the INCF Programs on Digital Brain Atlasing and Ontologies of Neural Structures. 

INCF and NeuroDevNet will jointly host a workshop on the topic of Canadian Neuroinformatics on May 24th, immediately following this year's Canadian Association for Neuroscience meeting (CAN 2012). The one-day symposium will have a rich and diverse scientific program followed by discussion of Canada’s possible future involvement in INCF. Registration is free of charge and includes lunch.

The INCF Task Force on Neuroimaging Datasharing recently published a review article in Frontiers in Neuroinformatics. The paper highlights the work of the Task Force in tackling the barriers associated with sharing data in the neuroimaging domain, producing services and tools to assist this process, and the need for raising awareness and motivation in the community.

Read our latest Annual Report, published 3 April 2012, to get a comprehensive view of INCF's activities and achievements during 2011. The report also contains a highlight article on the German/Norwegian/Polish Node collaboration for more reliable spike sorting and better understanding of dynamic brain activity.

Neuroinformatics 2012, the 5th Neuroinformatics Congress organized by INCF, is now open for registration. This year's meeting takes place in Munich on September 10-12, and is immediately followed by the Bernstein Conference on Computational Neuroscience, held September 12-14. Discounted "early bird" registration fees are available until June 1.

Philanthropist Paul G. Allen has committed another $300M of funding to the Allen Institute for Brain Science. The institute plans to double its staff over the next four years, and to launch three new scientific initiatives designed to yield knowledge of fundamental principles governing brain function. All data and other resources will be curated and publicly shared, for free, before publication.

For the second year, INCF participates as a mentoring organization in the Google Summer of Code. This program allows students to join open source development projects over the summer, while being paid by Google. Our project proposals are related to INCF core activities, INCF Programs and National Nodes. Student applications open on March 26.

Brain-related diseases cause much suffering and place a huge toll on the health care systems of the world. The Dana Foundation coordinates Brain Awareness Week (BAW) to increase public awareness of the benefits and progress of brain research. BAW currently has 2,800 partners in universities, hospitals, patient groups, government agencies, service organizations, professional associations, and schools. 

Do you feel at home in the Cloud? Are iRODS, Hadoop, distributed computing, linked data, and deep analytics familiar terms to you? Good - we are developing collaborative research data infrastructure for neuroscience and need your help. Send us your application latest March 31 to jobs@incf.org.

Leading scholarly publisher Elsevier announced on Feb 27 that they withdraw support for the Research Works Act. The statement underlines their commitment to making published research and data widely accessible, and that they "firmly believe that more cooperation and partnership between funders and publishers is the best way to expand free public access".

On Alan Turing's 100th birthday this week, Nature named him one of the top scientific minds of all time. He is celebrated with a special issue containing articles on computing, Turing machines, and biological pattern generation.

Eyewire, launched out of MIT, is a game-in-the-making that lets anyone reconstruct neurons from a stack of electron microscope images of the retina. It is based on computational techniques from the lab of Sebastian Seung and the hard work of a group composed mostly of MIT undergraduate students. 

We have just opened the abstract submission for the Neuroinformatics 2012 Congress, which will take place in Munich on September 10-12. Submit an interesting proposal for a poster or demo, before the deadline April 20, then come to Munich in September to show and discuss it!

In an opinion piece in the latest issue of Neuron, Michael Milham argues that the neuroimaging community needs to reform into a culture of  'open science', to overcome barriers such as large data sets, high data dimensionality, and limited storage capability. The article lists many open science initiatives and tools within neuroinformatics.

The knowledge management platform TranSMART, developed by medical company Johnson&Johnson, will be made available as open source in a series of releases early this spring. The tool is targeted towards the biomedical research community, especially translational research, and allows users to integrate and analyze data from many sources and formats.

Will a reputation economy handled via online scientific communities and social networks for researchers be able to replace the traditional credit-by-publishing model? Perhaps, with a new generation, say interviewed researchers in New York Times' fascinating snapshot of the state of open science in 2012.

Scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and MIT have developed a quicker method for imaging whole mouse brains; serial two-photon tomography (STP). The procedure is described in a recently published Nature Methods paper. A whole-brain scan can take a mere 6.5 to 8.5 hours at typical resolutions, quick enough to potentially "transform the emerging field of systematic whole-brain anatomy [...] into a routine methodology". 

The Biomag 2012 competition for analysis of MEG imaging data aims to promote the development and application of new analysis techniques for decoding of brain activity. The organizers also hope to elucidate pros and cons of the different techniques, and to attract signal-processing experts from outside the field. The deadline for submitting results is August 17, 2012.

INCF Travel Grants fund neuroinformatics researchers and students who wish to travel for scientific collaborations. Beginning January 2012, the rules for these grants have been updated to emphasize scientific collaboration between Nodes and knowledge transfer in research.

NeuroDebian provides an integrated platform of neuroscience software tools. Its popularity has grown quickly over the last few years.  We interviewed the two NeuroDebian leads Michael Hanke and Yaroslav Halchenko about the project, its past and future.

We would like to wish you all happy holidays and best wishes for the new year! 

We would like to wish Happy Holidays to all our colleagues and best wishes for 2012!

The Belgian INCF Node is organizing the first Belgian Neuroinformatics meeting in Antwerp on December 16.  The aim of the meeting is to disseminate recent neuroinformatics developments and to provide the local community with an opportunity to interact and network with international and local experts. 

Members of the Norwegian, German and Polish INCF Node communities have set up a successful collaboration on validation and benchmarking of spike sorting methods. A paper describing the resulting tools and services was recently published in Current Opinion in Neurobiology. There is also a web service,  www.g-node.org/spike, hosted and maintained by the German INCF Node (G-node).

The journal Current Biology has just published a feature article on the rapidly growing importance of the rodent brain as a key neuroscience model system. The article prominently features the INCF Digital Atlasing program, including the Waxholm Space and the Digital Atlasing Infrastructure.

Read the article (free)

The journal Current Biology has just published a feature article on the rodent brain as a key neuroscience model system. The article prominently features the INCF Digital Atlasing program, including the Waxholm Space and the Digital Atlasing Infrastructure.

29-30 November 2011: From Computational Models to Engineering and Cognition - promoting exchange of ideas & collaboration between UK researchers in the areas of Neurally-Inspired Engineering, Computational Models & Simulation Environments” & “AI, Cognition and Behaviour”, and building the UK neuroinformatics research community. Venue: Chancellor's at Manchester University.

We are present at Neuroscience 2011 in Washington, November 12-16 at the Walter E Washington Convention Center. We will be organizing a satellite workshop on Neuroshare on the 12th, and hosting neuroinformatics demos in our booth on the 13th-16th. As in previous years, we will be colocated with a number of other neuroinformatics projects and initiatives. You are very welcome to come and visit us in booth #3211.