The Neuro Bureau is proud to announce the 2012 Brainhack, to be held from September 1-4 at the Max Plank Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany.

Brainhack 2012 is a unique workshop with the goals of fostering interdisciplinary collaboration and open neuroscience. The structure builds from the concepts of an unconference and a hackathon: The term “unconference” refers to the fact that most of the content will be dynamically created by the participants — a hackathon is an event where participants collaborate intensively on science-related projects.

Participants from all disciplines related to neuroimaging are welcome. Ideal participants span in range from graduate students to professors across any disciplines willing to contribute (e.g., mathematics, computer science, engineering, neuroscience, psychology, psychiatry, neurology, medicine, art, etc…). The primary requirement is a desire to work in close collaborations with researchers outside of your specialization in order to address neuroscience questions that are beyond the expertise of a single discipline.

Program

Brainhack 2012 will last 3.5 days, with the first night being dedicated to registration, a brief introduction of participants, and a poster session / cocktail hour. Each of the next two days will begin with an “Ignite Session” in which distinguished neuroscience researchers will give 10 minute talks that will address wide questions in neuroscience that would benefit from open, interdisciplinary collaborations. The “Ignite Session” will be followed by a dynamic set of talks organized by attendees. This session will be scheduled on-site, and aims to reflect participants’ interests as they evolve over the course of the workshop. Each afternoon and evening will then include a brainhack session, in which participants will be encouraged to work together in small groups on relevant neuroscience projects. The workshop will culminate on the last day, when participants will have the opportunity to present a brief overview of their project.

We aim for Brainhack 2012 to be a highly dynamic event. As such, participants are encouraged to come prepared to discuss their research interests and work during the unconference portion of the workshop. In addition, there will be an opportunity for participants to present posters on Saturday night. If you are interested in doing so, please indicate this on the registration form so that we can be sure to have poster space allocated.

Brainhack 2012 Projects

In order to maximize the productivity of the hackathon portion of Brainhack 2012, we encourage participants to come with potential (or established) collaborators and projects in mind. Participants are encouraged to advertise projects, or shop for a team of collaborators at the brainhack.org web site prior to the conference. To create a new brainhack project fill out the Submit a new project form and make sure to indicate that this is a Brainhack 2012 project in the description.

Computational Resources

Several of the Brainhack 2012 projects are likely to require substantial computational resources. We have yet to identify a computer cluster to use during the hackathon. Participants should come prepared with the resources that they need to work on their projects. If you have access to or know of computational resources that could be made openly available to Brainhack 2012 participants, please contact the conference organizers at info at neurobureau.org.

Data

We will have preprocessed copies of several datasets onsite for participants to use (if they want):

• The ADHD-200 Sample(resting state fMRI, structural, clinical population)
• International Neuroimaging Data-sharing Initiativedatasets (structural, resting state fMRI, DTI)
• Openfmri.orgdatasets (task fMRI, structural)
• The NeuroSynth database (meta-analysis of neuroimaging literature)

If you have data that you would like make available at Brainhack 2012, please contact the conference organizers at info at neurobureau.org.

Results

Participants will have the opportunity to provide a brief presentation of the project that they worked on, and the progress made, on the last day of Brainhack 2012. Participants are encouraged to make results from their Brainhack experience openly available on a resource such as NITRC or github.

Registration

Registration costs 200 euros and includes all meals for the 3.5 days. To register please visit: http://www.cbs.mpg.de/events/workshops/brainhack.

Important Dates

Registration Deadline: 30 July 2012
Payment Deadline: 7 August 2012
Final Program: 30 August 2012

Organizing Committee

Brainhack.org and the Brainhack 2012 are initiatives of The Neuro Bureau.

• Pierre Bellec (Centre de recherche de l’institut de gériatrie de Montréal, Université de Montréal, Canada)
• Cameron Craddock (Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, USA)
• Daniel Margulies (Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, DE)
• Donald McLaren (Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, USA)
• Maarten Mennes (Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, The Netherlands)

INDI or the International Neuroimaging Datasharing Initiative is dedicated to accelerating our understanding of the brain’s functional architecture through the implementation of open data-sharing and discovery-based science. Extending the original 1000 Functional Connectomes project, INDI houses 3000+ resting-state FMRI and anatomical datasets. To complement the imaging data INDI encourages contributors to share various phenotypic data, including behavioral questionnaires and cognitive test results as well as physical measures (height, weight) and even DNA samples. These data are aggregated from over 30 independent international imaging sites from around the world.

An initial publication announcing the sample and presenting feasibility analyses was published by Biswal et al. in 2010. Since its initial launch the dataset (or parts of it) is being used in an increasing number of publications ranging from methodological papers to clinical studies.

Who are the members ?

INDI was founded by an international consortium of scientists interested in neuroimaging. To get an idea of who’s involved you can visit this INDI info page.

What can I do ?

You are warmly invited to contribute datasets to the initiative. In addition, INDI welcomes any effort related to processing the available data and making the results publicly available. For an example of such effort, check out the ADHD-200 prepocessed! project.

How can I contribute ?

If you want to contribute data to INDI, you can contact the project coordinator, Michael Milham, through the form below. For questions regarding the data or its usage you can stop by the INDI community forums.

This is a stackoverflow-like exchange for neuroinformatics at area 51. This resource provides a quantitative way to assess the importance of questions and their answers, inspired by mathoverflow.net

What can I do ?

Read and score the questions & answers and follow the list. You can also submit a question. Relevant topics are (non exhaustive list):

• ontologies and lexicons
• computing and database infrastructures
• usage questions of tools
• resources- questions that wikipedia does not have the answer to

How can I join ?

Go to the Q&A list and click “follow”.

Who are the members ?

The project was started by Satrajit Ghosh. A list of recent followers can be found on the website.

The ADHD-200 consortium has released a large database of structural MRI, resting-state functional MRI raw datasets, along with phenotypic data acquired on a large cohort of children and adolescents, both for typically developing individuals as well as patients diagnosed with an attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This project aims at preprocessing this database using a variety of strategies, and make the outcome publicly available for the community to use.

What can I do ?

You can download some of the preprocessed datasets already available (see a description of the methods here). You can also provide alternative preprocessed results.

How can I join ?

Please contact info [at] neurobureau.org

Who are the members ?

This project runs under the hood with the neurobureau. Involved members are:

• Cameron Craddock (Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, USA)
• Pierre Bellec (Centre de recherche de l’institut de gériatrie de Montréal,Université de Montréal, Canada)
• Carlton Chu (Section of Functional Imaging Methods, Laboratory of Brain and Cognition, NIMH, NIH, Bethesda, USA)
• François Chouinard-Decorte (Centre de recherche de l’institut de gériatrie de Montréal,Université de Montréal, Canada)
• Sébastien Lavoie-Courchesne (Centre de recherche de l’institut de gériatrie de Montréal,Université de Montréal, Canada)

NeuroSynth is a platform for large-scale, automated synthesis of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data extracted from published articles.

What can I do ?

Currently you can download most of the images on the website by clicking on the ‘Download image’ link under the corresponding image. In the near future, you’ll also be able to download coordinate and study lists. Data dumps of the full coordinate database and various image datasets will also be made available shortly.

All data available on this site are released under an Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL). This means that while the data are free to use and adapt however you wish, there are some restrictions you need to abide by. Namely, you must (a) attribute any public use of the database, (b) publicly share (under a same or compatible license) any derivate or adapted works, and (c) distribute an open version of any derivative works. For more information on the license, see thehuman-readable summary or the full legalese.

The NeuroSynth framework is built on several interrelated packages, most of which are available in our github repository. There’s also some rudimentary documentation, which I’ll add to as time allows. Contributions to the codebase are very welcome.

How can I join ?

One of our main goals in developing NeuroSynth is to promote open, synthesis-oriented approaches to the analysis of neuroimaging data. We think open science is the best kind of science, and are gradually making most of our software, data, and results publicly available to that end. If you have any comments, suggestions, bug reports, or questions, please email Tal Yarkoni.

Who are the members ?

The NeuroSynth framework is a collaborative effort between Tal Yarkoni, Tor Wager, Tom Nichols, Russ Poldrack, and David Van Essen. The website, and most of the underlying analysis tools, were developed by Tal Yarkoni. Lots of other people have contributed valuable feedback and testing, including Alex Shackman, Drew Fox, Luke Chang, Tim Vickery, Jessica Andrews-Hanna, and members of the Neuroimaging Data Access Group.

The OpenfMRI project was established in 2010 to provide a resource for researchers interested in making their fMRI data openly available to the research community.

What can I do ?

You can contribute an fMRI database to the project.

How can I join ?

Create an account on openfmri.org.

Who are the members ?

The project is managed by Russ Poldrack at the University of Texas at Austin, with computing resources provided by the Texas Advanced Computing Center.

The OpenfMRI project is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation (OCI-1131441).

A list of the investigators who contributed datasets can be found on the website.

The ADHD-200 Sample is a grassroots initiative, dedicated to accelerating the scientific community’s understanding of the neural basis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) through the implementation of open data-sharing and discovery-based science. Towards this goal, the ADHD-200 consortium has publicly released 776 resting-state fMRI and anatomical datasets aggregated across 8 independent imaging sites, 491 of which were obtained from typically developing individuals and 285 in children and adolescents with ADHD (ages: 7-21 years old). Accompanying phenotypic information includes: diagnostic status, dimensional ADHD symptom measures, age, sex, intelligence quotient (IQ) and lifetime medication status. More information on the ADHD-200 website.

What can I do ?

You can contribute datasets to the study. It is also possible to process either parts of the database or the full database and share the results publicly, see the ADHD-200 prepocessed! project

Who are the members ?

See the ADHD-200 website for a list of contributors.

How can I join ?

If you want to contribute data to the ADHD-200 sample, you can contact the project coordinator, Michael Milham, through the form below. For questions regarding the data or its usage you can stop by the INDI community forums.