The UK Neuroinformatics Node: Events and Projects

Upcoming Events: soonest first

The University of Newcastle is holding a conference entitled Computational Neurology, 20-21 February 2017. The aim is to help apply the advances in computing and neuroscience to the clinical field for the benefit of patients.
The UK Node has successfully proposed a Neuroinformatics Symposium at the forthcoming BNA Festival of Neuroscience to be held 10-13 April 2017, in Birmingham UK. The symposium (Symposium 26) will be on Wednesday 12 April 2017, 13:20 to 15:00, and the programme is now available.
The 2017 INCF Neuroinformatics Symposium will be in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 20-21 August 2017. There is further information at the Symposium website.

UK Node Activities:

The UK Node presented at the 2nd Annual Neuroscience R&D Technologies Conference, at the Sheraton Skyline Hotel, Heathrow, London, 29-30 September 2016. We were presenting as the proposed BNA Special Interest Group in Neuroinformatics, and we displayed a poster at this meeting.
The 2016 INCF Neuroinformatics Symposium was in Reading, UK, 3-4 September 2016. There were 171 attendees, and the there is more info at the Symposium website. The meeting was preceded by a nodes workshop (the 15th INCF Nodes Workshop), and followed by the first meeting of the Council for Training, Science and Infrastructure (CTSI), all in Reading. The slides from the UK Node are available.
The INCF and UK Node of the INCF held a Neuroinformatics social at FENS 2016 on Monday 4 July 2016. All the presentations can be found on the INCF Social at FENS web page.
The UK Node, along with eFutures, held a meeting which brought together different types of neuroscientists (from clinical to experimental to computational modellers to neuro-engineers) to enable co-operation. The slides from the presentations at the event are now available.
The meeting was a 1 day meeting, on 3 May 2016, at Liverpool University’s campus in London.
A report on this meeting is available.

The node is primarily involved in

supporting meetings within the UK,
training activities, both within the UK, and worldwide
representing the UK at the INCF itself

A proposal to revitalise the UK node, (and to pay the UK fees for INCF, 2016-2020) was submitted to the UK Medical research Council in summer 2015, but was not successful. Nonetheless, we are continuing to work on encouraging and improving Neuroinformatics in the UK.

UK Node activities over the last few years

We have fostered the UK neuroinformatics community through holding community events, and in particular encouraging the development of the Special Interest groups.

In addition we have had two main objectives.

Objective 1: Improved engagement with both academic and industrial UK neuroscience research
- Focussed initiatives for neuroscientists. In conjunction with the SIGs, have scoped out areas of neuroscience which each have a common set of issues concerning the takeup of neuroinformatics by neuroscientists.
- Educating neuroinformatics researchers. We have held several workshops for researchers from a computational background led by experimental neuroscientists.
- Interactions with industry. The dialogue between neuroscience in UK industry and neuroinformatics is currently sparse in coverage. Guided by our new industrial member of the Steering Committee, we have been trying to identify new opportunities for collaborative research, knowledge transfer and training.

Objective 2: Strategic projects. We identified two specific projects that are of vital importance to the UK community and which serve as a secondary vehicle to deliver on Objective (1).
- Creating a human fMRI database. We had intended to hold a UK workshop to discuss the issue of standardisation of data-sharing within human MRI research for the purpose of meta-analysis. Our proposed activity involving the neuroimaging community would complement the work of the INCF Neuroimaging Data-sharing Task Force, who are concentrating on the technical issues surrounding uploading fMRI data for sharing and pipelining for MRI analysis.
-Making models more accessible through kitemarking. We proposed to investigate the feasibility of introducing kitemarking computational models to a suitable neuroscience journal, or even for providing an independent kitemarking service that could be used by any journal. We will devise possible kitemarking schemes and utilise them on both published and unpublished models and analysis methods. These results will be assessed by the UK community for their applicability to computational papers as well as their value to experimental neuroscientists.

Past events involving the UK Neuroinformatics Node

The 2015 International Conference on Brain Informatics and Health will be held at Imperial College London, 30 August to 2 September 2015.
INCF event: Neuroinformatics 2015, Cairns, Australia, 20-22 August 2015. Event website.
3rd Baltic-Nordic Summer School on Neuroinformatics (BNNI 2015) Multiscale computational neuroscience: Neurons, networks and systems
Place: University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia Date: June 15-18, 2015
The third annual Open Source Brain Workshop takes place on May 12-14th 2015 in Alghero, Sardinia. This workshop is centred on the problems of building and sharing experimentally constrained models of cortex, cerebellum and hippocampus.
Spatial computation: from neural circuits to robot navigation, the Informatics Forum, Edinburgh, April 11th, 2015. A workshop focussing on computations underlying navigation from the perspectives of neuroscience and robotics. A list of confirmed speakers and a link for registration are here: http://blog.inf.ed.ac.uk/spatialcomputationworkshop/
Integrated Systems Neuroscience Workshop 2015, Manchester, UK, 23-24 March 2015. A workshop to demonstrate the power and potential in state-of-the-art integrated systems and computational approaches to key neural circuits.
20-21st November 2012 - Building Bridges to Build Brains in Edinburgh; in collaboration with eFutures. Organised by eFutures and hosted by the UK Node, this 2-day meeting aimed to bring people from the Computational Neuroscience, Neuromorphic Hardware and Robotics communities together to tackle key problems and forge new cross-disciplinary collaborations. The 2-day meeting took place at the Informatics Forum in Edinburgh on 20th-21st November 2012 and included talks from from David Willshaw (Edinburgh), Steve Furber (Manchester) and Leslie Smith (Stirling) on the challenges faced by their communities. There were also opportunities to network and included a poster session and breakout sessions. Details of the event including presentations of the speakers can be found at the eFutures webpage here.
15-16th May 2012 - Atlas Informatics Workshop in Edinburgh; SIG2 supported this workshop.
26-28th March 2012 - Second UK NI Node Congress, Edinburgh; to bring together people who are already working in the field and showcase opportunities in neuroinformatics to people working in related disciplines.
12-16th March 2012 - The Node sponsored Convergence in Computational Neuroscience 2012 in Edinburgh and SIG4 provided a small number of bursaries.
23-24th January 2012 - "Image-based Neuroinformatics"; SIG2 workshop in Newcastle; bringing together developers and users of neuroimaging tools.
29-30th November 2011 - "UK Neuroinformatics: From Computational Models to Engineering and Cognition"; Joint Workshop with SIG 3,4+5 in Manchester; to promote collaboration between the members of these SIGs. For further details, click here.
15-16th September 2011 - "Electrophysiology"; SIG1 Workshop in York; provided an overview of current computational and experimental approaches related to Electrophysiology.
20th April 2011 - Neuroinformatics for Neuroscientists; one day conference at the British Neuroscience Association (BNA) annual meeting in Harrogate.
1st April 2011 - 3rd NeuralML Development Workshop in London; meeting discussed the ongoing development of the next major version (v2.0) of the NeuroML language for describing neuronal & network models in a standardized format.
13-14th September 2010 - Workshop on "Future Challenges in Mathematical and Computational Neuroscience" at Oxford University, hosted by Peter Dayan. A report from the workshop can be found here.
31st August 2010 - Workshop on "Neural Coding and Computation" at University of Manchester hosted by Marcelo Montemurro.
2-3rd June 2010 - Workshop on "Spike train measures and their applications to Neural Coding" at University of Plymouth, hosted by Thomas Wennekers - for a report from this workshop, please click here.
2-4th June 2010 - Workshop on "Neurocomputational Basis of Motivational and Cognitive Control" at Oxford University, hosted by Rogier Mars and Jerome Sallet.
1-3rd February 2010 - INCF UK Node Congress in Edinburgh; International conference on "Analysing and modelling neural systems in health and disease" which included ten plenary speakers, a set of collaborative workshops and poster sessions.
23rd November 2009 - Workshop on "Computational Brain" at University of Leicester hosted by Ivan Tyukin - for a report from this workshop, please click here.
9th September and 26-27th October 2009 - Training in Neuroinformatics II and III (; International workshops in Pilsen, Czech Republic and Edinburgh (EU funded and EU co-funded respectively) on "Needs for training in Neuroinformatics: extended and short course provision". A report from the INCF is available here.
27-28th November 2008 - The UK INCF Node co-hosted a workshop on "Computational Developmental Neuroscience".
23-25th July 2008 - Training in Neuroinformatics I; International workshop in Edinburgh on "Current neuroinformatics training and future training needs" (EU funded). A report to the INCF was published in November 2008 in Nature Proceedings.

Past conferences run by INCF:

August 2014 - 7th INCF Congress on Neuroinformatics in Leiden, The Netherlands. Event website.
August 2013 - 6th INCF Congress on Neuroinformatics in Stockholm, Sweden. Event website.
September 2012 - 5th INCF Congress on Neuroinformatics in Munich, Germany. Event website.
September 2011 - 4th INCF Congress on Neuroinformatics in Boston, USA. Event website.
September 2010 - 3rd INCF Congress on Neuroinformatics in Kobe, Japan. Event website.
September 2009 - 2nd INCF Congress on Neuroinformatics in Pilsen, Czech Republic. Event website and report.
September 2008 - 1st INCF Congress on Neuroinformatics in Stockholm, Sweden. Event website.

Past events run as the UK Neuroinformatics Network:

April 2008 - Grant application submitted to MRC for support of the UK INCF Node.
April 2008 - Joint workshop with CARMEN looking at the neuroinformatics needs amongst UK neurophysiologists for storage and processing of time series data.
13-14 December 2007 - 1st INCF Workshop on "Training in Informatics", Stockholm, Sweden. Click here for a report from the workshop.
6-7th September 2007 - workshop on International Aspects of Neuroinformatics: plenary speakers reviewed the state of neuroinformatics in their own country. UK NI delegates voted to reconstitute the UK NI Network as the UK INCF Node, the UK community supporting the INCF. A Steering Committee was formed.
1st August 2007 - UK joins the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF).
26th March 2007 - workshop on Neural Coding, University of Manchester. Organised by Marcelo Montemurro, Stefano Panzeri and Rasmus Petersen.
15-16th March 2007 - workshop on Deep Brain Stimulation, Imperial College, London. An international symposium where researchers from different backgrounds will be able to meet in person, identify the direction of future research, and discuss possible collaborative projects in the DBS field.
Winter 2006/early-2007 - a questionnaire on the benefits of neuroinformatics to neuroscience was circulated. This was targetted at experimental neuroscientists.
24-25th April 2006 - workshop on Systems Biology Meets Neuroinformatics: five plenary talks and discussions aimed at bringing together leading researchers to explore areas of overlap between the two communities.
February 2006 - two meetings exploring international neuroinformatics, with a view to the UK joining the INCF.
July-December 2005 - seedcorn funding for the preparation of the CARMEN proposal to EPSRC on sharing and integrating neural data, culminating in the award of £4.5M funding. (CARMEN website can be found here)
July-December 2005 - a UK-wide report on neuroinformatics training from undergraduate level to postdoc and beyond: availability of training, availability of funding for training, perceived needs for future training.
27-28th June 2005 - workshop on UK Neuroinformatics: three plenary talks followed by discussion sessions aimed at establishing the state-of-the-art of neuroinformatics and identifying important issues for the future.
January-March 2005 - a survey was conducted to investigate how best the UKNN can serve the community.