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Message from the Executive Director
Welcome to the autumn 2015 edition of the INCF newsletter! The recent Neuroinformatics Congress in Cairns, Australia was a very enjoyable and warm event, not just because of our tropical location but because of the people who attended and the amount of community interaction and new collaborations formed! Our next Congress in 2016 will be held in Reading, UK. Stay tuned for information about an exciting scientific and social Program, with opportunities for discovering collaborators, science and history!
New strategic focus: accelerating dementia research
Due to its enormous social and economic burden and the rapidly aging global population, INCF member countries have identified accelerating research in dementia as being of strategic importance for INCF’s new phase beginning 2016. In September, INCF and OECD partnered to host a workshop aimed at examining strategies to incentivise data sharing in dementia research. Recommendations will be published soon and taken forward by both organisations.
New INCF: Special Interest Groups and seed funding
The strategic plan for INCF’s third phase 2016-20 is now available online. The strength of our organisation comes from our community and the aim of the next phase is to galvanise and grow that community in order to advance the field and deliver value to neuroscience. From 2016, the INCF Programs will transition to a new structure based on broad community engagement. Strategic Action Areas will provide targeted areas of focus. Special interest groups will be a mechanism for community to come together and collaborate. Seed funding will be available to advance developments in the field. As the era of data-intensive neuroscience increasingly demands new skill-sets, training and education will have new emphasis for our organisation. INCF also will continue to help coordinate developments in the emerging large-scale international brain initiatives.
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Participants at the INCF-OECD dementia workshop
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INCF-OECD workshop on data sharing in dementia
Efficient sharing of data in the experimental and clinical neurosciences would be of huge benefit to the field. Previous workshops hosted by the OECD and by INCF have identified barriers such as lack of incentives and support for producing, organizing and sharing reusable data. On September 21-22, INCF and OECD therefore hosted a joint workshop in Stockholm to bring together policy-makers, funders, and leading scientists to consider these issues in relation to dementia research and to identify practical steps that can be taken to advance data sharing in this field. View the workshop webpage for more information. |
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NI2015 lecture by Richard Frackowiak (view the video)
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INCF Congress in Cairns, Australia
On August 20-22, the INCF community met in Cairns, Australia. A selection of the recorded talks are available on our YouTube channel, and photos from the meeting days can be found on Flickr. We have also put together a Storify timeline of the event, with collected social media posts, videos and photos.
In conjunction with the Congress, an introductory neuroinformatics training course and a workshop on the Neuroimaging Informatics Data Model (NIDM) were also held.
Save the date! The 2016 INCF Neuroinformatics Congress will be held in Reading, UK, on September 3-5 - half an hour with direct bus from Heathrow. See neuroinformatics2016.org for more details.
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Participants at the INCF Nodes WS discuss how to best present INCF and its Nodes on the web.
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INCF Nodes Workshop in Cairns
Representatives from INCF National Nodes met in Cairns just before the Neuroinformatics Congress, to discuss the start of INCF's phase 3 and the role of special interest groups in relation to the Nodes. The representatives also presented current projects and helped the Secretariat concretize plans for a new INCF website.
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Successfully completed Summer of Code
INCF has participated as a mentoring organization in the Google Summer of Code for the fifth year running. The GSoC is an initiative where students apply to work on projects mentored by the open source developer community. This year, students were accepted to work on projects improving and extending neuroscience tools under the guidance of INCF community mentors - ranging from mobile applications for EEG data, 3D printing of brain atlases, biophysically realistic modelling and GPU programming. 12 of the original 15 successfully completed their projects. A further two students who did not get financed by the program were co-sponsored by INCF to work on their suggested projects.
See the full list of projects here
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Global interest in CENTER-TBI
CENTER-TBI, the large EU study on advancing the care of patients with Traumatic Brain Injury, has attracted significant international interest. Besides the originally participating 21 European countries, China and Australia started patient enrolment this spring and are now collecting data. Discussions with Japan, Malaysia and India are ongoing.
With 3.5 years left, the project has completed half of its data collection period, bringing the number of patients to 5789 so far. The data collection platform and an early version of the analysis platform, both developed under INCF coordination, will be demonstrated at Society for Neuroscience, in INCF's booth #2114 (Monday October 19, 11.15 am - 1 pm).
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