--Apologies for cross-posting--

Google Summer of Code is a global, online program focused on bringing new contributors into open source software development.  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(s) for our 2 proposals will take published computational models and experimental datasets and convert them into open, standardised formats (e.g. NeuroML and NWB) and share them on the OSB platform as a resource for the wider community. The two projects are:

Open source, cross simulator, large scale cortical models in NeuroML and PyNN

These can be models where code is 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.

Conversion of public neurophysiology datasets to Neurodata Without Borders (NWB) format

This project will involve converting a number of publicly available datasets to NWB format, adding structured metadata to ensure maximal readability and reusability of the data. The converted datasets will be made available through the new NWB Explorer on the Open Source Brain repository (http://nwbexplorer.opensourcebrain.org) which allows visualisation of the data as well as interactive analysis through an inbuilt Jupyter notebook.

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

Closing date for student applications: 19 April 2022
Period of working on projects: 13 June - 12 September 2022

Please get in contact if you have any questions.

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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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