[Neuro-2008-committee] status update (look particulalry at B)

[Rodney Douglas]

STATUS at 25 Oct 2007

Rob has added B, and is ready to go.
It looks very nice to me.
I propose that Rob go ahead if there are no objections / comments
by midnight CET 25 Oct 

** Rob also needs a supporter / deputy from the Organizing
Commitee.
Could some please volunteer?

==r


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Keynote speakers:  status:  50% acceptance 
Accepted: Kennedy, Ellisman and van Essen
No reply: Kawato, Cerf, and Sejnowski.  INVITATIONS RESENT


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Workshop A:   status: OK
(Anders / Erik)
"Future hardware  challenges to scientific computing" 

The goal of this workshop is summarized as:
The recent move of the computer industry towards multi-core  
technology will cause parallel programming to spread through all  
levels of society. Although many neuroscientific computing  
applications are already parallel they are often not optimized for  
multicore configurations. We will consider these challenges both from  
a computer science, scientific computing, and a neuroinformatics  
perspective. In addition we will consider some of the opportunities  
massive parallelism offer in how we model neuronal networks.

Invited workshop speakers get to speak for 20 min + 5 min  
discussion.  We will have 3 invited speakers, one of whom will be a  
computer scientists who will cover multicore computing from a  
computer science perspective.  In addition two contributions will be  
selected from submitted abstracts for 10 min + 5 min discussion each.  
The session will end with a 15 min panel discussion and you are  
invited to be part of this panel.

Gewaltig and Wittum have accepted.
Erik and Anders wait with third invitation 'till they have heard candidates 
speak in december

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Workshop B  status:  AWAITING APPROVAL 
(Robert W. Williams, and one other interest member )
Neurogenomics meets bioinformatics meets neuroinformatics


SYNOPSIS/PURPOSE: Massive data sets on the 
expression of genes and proteins in the central 
nervous systems are rapidly altering the 
neuroscience research landscape and are 
fundamentally changing how investigators develop 
and test hypotheses.

This workshop will highlight  powerful and open 
genomic resources that are part of a new wave of 
information dissemination. Example include the 
Allen Brain Atlas, GeneNetwork, and 
Genes2Cognition. The workshop leaders will 
illustrate how neurogenomic resources are having 
an impact on our basic understanding of brain 
structure and function. They will also illustrate 
how these resources are having an impact on 
translational research. Exploiting neurogenomic 
resources usually requires judicious combination 
with large data sets on DNA, RNA, and protein 
sequence and variation. One of the major goals of 
neuroinformatics is to successfully blend these 
highly diverse bioinformatic resources with the 
rapidly growing neuroscience literature. It 
should soon be possible to efficiently and 
correctly answer specific questions about brain 
function and disease using sophisticated 
neuroinformatic web portals such as that being 
built by the INCF and BIRN. This entail the 
assembly of distributed computer systems that are 
coupled by well established conventions for data 
annotation, calculation, and information exchange.

WORKSHOP SPEAKERS
1. Seth Grant (Sanger) or Guus Smit on proteomic of the synaptosome
2. Gerd Kemperman (Dresden) or Rusty Gage,  (or 
Floyd Bloom, ** but is also being considered for Workshop C) on large gene 
expression data set
3. Ed Lein (ABA) or Johan Auwerx (Illkirch) on 
the ABA and Nuclear Receptor Brain database

Invited workshop speakers would speak for 20 min with 5 min for Q&A.

The three lead speakers will be encouraged to 
focus their presentations on genomics and the 
HIPPPOCAMPUS. The hippocampus will serve as a 
common target of analysis using three very 
different neurogenomic methods. This will 
provide some thematic coherence to the workshop.

In addition two to three contributions will be
selected from submitted abstracts for 5 min + 2 min discussion each.

The session will end with a 15 min panel 
discussion on prospects and challenges with a 
focus on how neuroinformatic and web services 
will facilitate faster and better neuroscience 
research.

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Workshop C  status: NO DESCRIPTION PARAGRAPH / NO PROGRESS REPORT
(Sten)
Political / Policy Workshop
Speakers: Kathy Olsen, David Sainsbury, Floyd Bloom


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Workshop D status:  INVITATIONS SENT

Extraction of structural and functional information from brain images
(Ulla Ruotsalainen, David Willshaw)

The focus of the workshop will be on imaging at different levels and the 
integration of imaging information: particularly, data integration from 
multi-modal imaging sources; multi-level data integration between microscopic 
and macroscopic levels; integration and extraction of data from large 
data-bases;
and extraction of structural and functional information from brain images

Invited speakers proposal:      
prof. Alan Evans McGill University Montreal (multimodal image data, 
data-bases)
prof. Stephen Smith Oxford University (fMRI and MRI analysis tools (FSL), 
young person but published a lot already)
in addition I would like to have here somebody from the microscopy imaging 
groups like MacKenzie-Graham (LONI) or Atlas groups like Amunts (Juelich) 
RJD proposed also Winfred Denk (serial blockface Electron microscopy)

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Workshop E. status INVITATIONS SENT
(Andrzej Wrobel, David Willshaw)
Challenges and benefits of multichannel electrophysiology

Advances in techniques for electrophysiological recording as well as in
analytical tools are enabling fascinating conceptual and engineering
developments in present-day electrophysiological studies of the brain.
This workshop will gather together  the scientists contributing to new
experimental, theoretical and engineering approaches to this branch of
systems neuroscience.

(Suggested speakers – two options - to be invited for delivering 
lectures in each subject proposed by the C-tee in Stockholm)

1. Extraction of information from large electrophysiological data sets
Gyorgi Buzsaki (MD,PhD; buzsaki at andromeda.rutgers.edu)
Ehud Ahissar (Prof. Dr.; ehud.ahissar at weizmann.ac.il)

2. Computational theory of information processing by neuronal systems 
(coding)
Michael Shadlen (MD, PhD; shadlen at u.washington.edu)
Alex Pouget (Prof., alex at bcs.rochester.edu)

3. Human machine interface:
Miguel Nicolelis (MD, PhD; nicoleli at neuro.duke.edu)
Niels Birbaumer (Prof. Dr phil; niels.birbaumer at uni-tuebingen.de)



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Demo Track  status:NO DESCRIPTION PARAGRAPH / NO PROGRESS REPORT
(Shiro)


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-- 
________________________________________________________________________
Prof. Rodney Douglas

Institute of Neuroinformatics     Tel : +41 1 635 3051
University/ETH Zurich             Fax : +41 1 635 3025
Winterthurerstrasse 190           rjd (at) ini phys ethz ch 
Zurich 8057, Switzerland          www.ini.unizh.ch
________________________________________________________________________