Preparing a workforce to meet the challenges of large-scale neuroscience data and producing curricula and resources for large-scale neuroscience data analysis

Place: Arlington, VA

Aim: The presentations and discussions of the workshop focused on three major issues related to workflows in electrophysiology: (i) the development of data structures and software libraries that enable interfacing of data from various sources and integration of methods for data manipulation and analysis, (ii) documentation and provenance tracking solutions to support reproducible analysis processes able to cope with the required levels of flexibility and data size, and (iii) workflow management systems that allow automatic and extensible processing of complex analysis workflows, in particular on high performance computers.

Place: Jülich, Germany

To assess the current state of the field and available software infrastructure for tissue modeling from within the field of neuroscience and other fields in order to broadly define an outline of the development needed. 

Place: Stockholm, Sweden

Aim: Evaluate the consilience between murine models and human disease, with an emphasis on neurological and psychiatric diseases that have high prevalence and burden.

Place:Utrecht, The Netherlands

Aim:  To assess the current state of the human brain mapping field and atlas generation to determine the requirements and challenges to the development of a multi-modal human brain atlas.

Place: Seattle, Washington

Aim: Asses and review the current state of rodent atlasing and atlasing tools, and to within this context identify possible barriers to community adoption of the INCF-developed Waxholm Space and its underlying Digital Atlasing Infrastructure.

Place: Stockholm, Sweden

Aim: This encyclopedia should provide a semantically organized forum that is built on the latest appropriate technologies and resources for the neuroscience community to develop and maintain ontologies with clear definitions and links to relevant literature, data, models and other resources.

Place: San Diego, United States

Aim: Share techniques and experiences from research groups working on whole brain data integration and modeling in different species. This includes issues including metadata annotation, standard vocabularies and ontologies, reference coordinate spaces and methods for performing analysis and data integration of large multiscale datasets. The outcome will help set the agenda for key developments in required standards and technologies to facilitate the integration of data in the fly, rodent and human brains.

Place: Stockholm, Sweden

Objective: Using tested and proven methods and algorithms for data analysis is an essential prerequisite for reproducible research. For many types of data analysis in neuroscience, however, there are no established measures or test data for quality assessment and comparison of methods. In this two-day workshop, we investigated the needs for concerted efforts to address validation of other analysis methods for different types of data. 

Place: Stockholm, Sweden

Objective: build the Canada neuroinformatics community, enabling Canadian scientists from diverse neuroinformatics-related fields to gather, exchange knowledge and discuss whether there was community desire for Canada to join the INCF.

Place: Vancuver, Canada

Objective: The aim of this workshop was to discuss the strategies for forming the Lithuanian Neuroinformatics Node and becoming a member of INCF. The workshop was organized by Dr. Aušra Saudargiene (Department of Informatics, Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, and Faculty of Natural Sciences, Vilnius University, Lithuania) and INCF.

Place: Kaunas, Lithuania

Objective: INCF recently started efforts to establish a cyberinfrastructure for neuroinformatics, including federated filesystems and object models for sharing neuroscientific data, and standards for workflows. The goal of this workshop is to discuss the development of an international federated dataspace for large-scale heterogeneous data.

Place: Stockholm, Sweden

Objective: Discuss the use and benefits of applying neuroinformatics at each step of building, evaluating and using genetic animal models for human brain diseases. Participants include both neuroinformaticians and experimentalists, with representatives from the mouse/rodent, fly, zebrafish and non-human primate research communities.

Place: Stockholm, Sweden

Theme: What are the issues arising when providing extended and short courses in neuroinformatics? How could the INCF facilitate training? In Workshop 2, delegates concentrated on developing the list of subject areas where neuroinformatics training is needed. In Workshop 3, there was discussion on both the stumbling blocks encountered when designing and running short courses and what new short courses are required. Ways in which INCF can be involved were identified, and specific recommendations on the coordination of existing material, validation of courses and funding of short training workshops were colllected and listed in this report.

Place: Pilsen, Czech Republic

Objective: Provide an overview of the current state of neuroinformatics training and to make recommendations for future training provisions. 

Place: Edinburgh, UK

Objective: Discuss issues related to sustainability of neuroscience databases, to identify problems, to discuss solutions or approaches to these problems, and to formulate recommendations to the INCF. 

Place: Stockholm, Sweden

Objective: Agree on a general strategy for developing a systematic, useful, and scientifically appropriate framework for neuroanatomical nomenclature. 

Place: Stockholm, Sweden

Objective: Map out existing portal services for neuroscience, identify their features and future plans, and outline opportunities for synergistic developments. 

Place: Stockholm, Sweden

Objective: Map existing neuroimaging databases, particularly databases containing primary data, and to identify mechanisms that could facilitate integrated use of such databases, including possible fusion of databases.

Place: Stockholm, Sweden

Objective: To survey current activities and plans related to mouse and rat brain digital atlasing systems and to produce a broad international inventory of resources and ongoing efforts. To review the range of techniques that are being used to build, normalize, segment, and label atlases and to examine what aspects of this technical work are redundant, compatible, and compliant across platforms. To forge an international network to foster increased collaboration and interoperability across national, linguistic, and funding barriers and to examine how to promote international collaborations in the future and to improve the impact of atlasing projects in the near term (5 years) while reducing costs and redundancy of these efforts.

Place: Stockholm, Sweden

Objective: Survey current demands and ongoing activities and plans relating to development of tools for scalable neural network simulations. 

Place: Stocholm, Sweden