(Apologies for cross postings)

Announcing the 2014 Open Source Brain Workshop: Building and sharing models of the cortex. May 14-16th, Alghero, Sardinia.

There are an increasing number of cortical cell and network models being developed and made publicly available, from networks of leaky integrate and fire neurons based on cortical connectivity and firing properties, to multicompartmental, conductance based cell models. Many of these are being reused, reimplemented and extended to address new scientific questions by labs around the world.

In this meeting, we will look at the range cortico-thalamic models out there which are of widespread interest and work towards getting these into public, open source repositories, in standardised formats such as NeuroML and PyNN. We will investigate the steps needed to ensure these models are well tested, annotated and ready for use as research tools by the attendees and the wider community. There will be presentations from experimentalists who are producing the data to constrain these models, as well as simulator and application developers who will create the infrastructure to build, simulate, analyse and share the models.

On the morning of Friday 16th, there will be a symposium on Oscillation and Resonance in CNS Network Loops. The symposium will focus on the reconstruction and analysis of oscillating networks. These methods can be applied at multiple levels of brain modelling providing valuable constraints for single neuron and network models. There will be presentations of modelling studies on how the brain generates oscillations and how external, oscillating electro-magnetic fields influence brain activity.

Confirmed speakers

Sharon Crook, Arizona State University, USA Markus Diesmann, Research Center Jülich, Germany Dirk Feldmeyer, Aachen University, Germany Alon Korngreen, Bar-Ilan University, Israel Dave Lester, SpiNNaker project, University of Manchester, UK Robert A. McDougal, Yale University School of Medicine, USA Michele Migliore, National Research Council, Italy & Yale University School of Medicine, USA Eilif Muller, Blue Brain Project, EPFL, Switzerland Ole Paulsen, University of Cambridge, UK Angus Silver, University College London Tim Vogels, University of Oxford, UK Daniel Wójcik, Nencki Institute, Poland

Full details of the workshop can be found here: http://www.opensourcebrain.org/projects/osb/wiki/OSB2014

There will also be a NeuroML Editorial Board meeting on Tues 13th. More details will follow on the NeuroML mailing lists. Interested parties are welcome to attend; please email p.gleeson@ucl.ac.uk.

The Open Source Brain initiative aims to encourage collaborative, open source model development in computational neuroscience and is primarily supported by the Wellcome Trust.

The OSB symposium is primarily supported by the IRCCS C. Mondino and the Italian Ministry of Health through the research project GR-2009-1493804.

Regards, The OSB 2014 organising committee