OSB Meeting in Sardinia, 2019

OSB Meeting in Sardinia, 2019#

The OSB workshop 2019 took place in Alghero, Sardinia in September 2019.

Dates	9am Monday 9th Sept. - 5pm Wednesday 11th Sept., 2019
Location	Hotel Calabona, Alghero, Sardinia
Organising committee	Padraig Gleeson, Matt Earnshaw, Angus Silver

Overview of the meeting#

Open Source Brain (http://www.opensourcebrain.org) was created as a platform for sharing and collaboratively developing models in computational neuroscience. Models of cells and circuits in standardised formats can be visualised, analysed and simulated through a standard web browser. The aim has been to improve the quality, accessibility and scientific rigour of models used to investigate brain function.

Following a renewal of our funding from the Wellcome Trust, we are expanding the functionality of the platform to also enable sharing of the experimental data behind the models. The OSB workshop 2019 highlighted the latest features of OSB and engaged current and future users of the platform through invited talks, hands on demonstrations, and user presentations.

The two key themes of the meeting were:

1) Accessible sharing of cellular neuroscience data

Through support for the Neurodata Without Borders (NWB) format, OSB will facilitate sharing of multiple types of experimental data used to constrain computational models, including electrophysiological recordings, Ca²⁺ florescence imaging, 2D, 3D and 4D imaging and behavioural data.

2) Modelling the cortex across scales

Cortical networks are modelled at many scales from abstract representations of interacting populations (neural masses) to networks of biophysically and morphologically detailed cell models. NeuroML is being expanded to cover a greater range of these models, which will allow them to be shared and simulated on OSB, facilitating comparison of models and ideas between researchers. This ongoing work is taking place as part of the SIG on Standardised Representations of Network Structures.

Agenda#

Wed 11th Sept Investigating brain function across multiple scales#

Morning session

9:00 Angus Silver Introduction to session (Slides)

9:02 Jan Fousek The Virtual Brain: building blocks for whole-brain modeling (Slides)

9:45 Sacha van Albada Large-scale spiking neural network modeling of primate cerebral cortex (Slides)

10:30 - 11:00 Coffee break

11:00 Yazan Billeh Large-scale Datasets and Modeling Tools from the Allen Institute for Brain Science (Slides)

11:45 Fleur Zeldenrust Understanding information transfer in the brain: from single cell to network (Slides)

12:15 Sergio Solinas The NeuroAgents ERC project (Slides)

12:30 - 13:30 Lunch

Afternoon session

13:30 Oren Amsalem Cellular mechanisms of auditory surprise in faithful computer replica of cortical microcircuit

14:00 Padraig Gleeson Creating cortical models across scales in NeuroML (Slides)

14:30 - 15:00 Coffee break

15:30 - 17:30 Discussion session: How can we create better multiscale models of circuits?

Are multiscale models of the brain worth the effort?
What are the benefits of bringing multiscale models and the experimental data used to build and test them together?
What are the key challenges in linking model structure, optimization and testing to experimental data?
Do Python notebooks provide the right balance in the trade-off between accessibility and flexibility in model building/data analysis for OSB infrastructure?

Speakers#

Name	Institution
Oren Amsalem	Hebrew University, Israel
Yazan Billeh	Allen Institute, USA
Matteo Cantarelli	MetaCell Ltd
Alex Cayco Gajic	University College London, UK & École Normale Supérieure, France
Sharon Crook	Arizona State University, USA
Jeffrey S. Diamond	NINDS, USA
Ian Duguid	University of Edinburgh, UK
Matt Earnshaw	University College London, UK
Jan Fousek	Aix Marseille Université, France
Padraig Gleeson	University College London, UK
Boris Marin	Universidade Federal do ABC, Brazil
Rajnish Ranjan	Blue Brain Project, EPFL, Switzerland
Diego Restrepo	University of Colorado, USA
Oliver Rübel	Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, USA
Simon Schultz	Imperial College, UK
Angus Silver	University College London, UK
Ankur Sinha	University of Hertfordshire, UK
Sacha van Albada	Jülich Research Centre, Germany
Fleur Zeldenrust	Radboud University, Netherlands
Yann Zerlaut	Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France

Enquiries#

If you have any enquiries about this meeting, please don’t hesitate to contact: p.gleeson@ucl.ac.uk.

Support#

This meeting was generously supported by:

^{Data in image above courtesy of Antoine Valera, UCL}