Google Summer of Code is an initiative to encourage students to contribute to open source software projects. Generous stipends are provided for successful applicants to work on these projects for a number of months over the summer.

The INCF has been a GSoC mentoring organisation for the past number of years, and has helped link up students with mentors to advance various projects in the wider neuroinformatics and computational neuroscience areas.

The Open Source Brain initiative is encouraging students to apply to be part of this. The successful candidate will take models of cells and networks from the cortex and convert them into open, standardised formats (e.g. NeuroML and PyNN) and place them in public repositories as a resource for the wider community. These can be published models available in simulator specific formats on ModelDB, or classic models from the literature which would benefit from curating/updating/documenting. Making models available in these formats will allow them to be used & tested across multiple simulators, make the physiological properties of the models more accessible and facilitate reuse of model components.

This opportunity is particularly relevant for Masters & PhD students currently working in model development in computational neuroscience. Many students are already converting/updating existing models as part of their work and this is a great opportunity to get paid extra to do this!

Closing date for student applications: 21st March 2014
Period of working on projects: 19 May - 18 August

Full information on this can be found here: http://incf.org/gsoc/2014/proposals/#open-source--cross-simulator--large-scale-cortical-models

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Padraig Gleeson
Room 321, Anatomy Building
Department of Neuroscience, Physiology&  Pharmacology
University College London
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT
United Kingdom

+44 207 679 3214
p.gleeson@ucl.ac.uk
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