Presented by the Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF), this series consists of several lectures characterizing cutting-edge, open-source software platforms and computational tools for neuroscientists. This course offers detailed descriptions of various neuroinformatic resources such as cloud-computing services, web-based annotation tools, genome browsers, and platforms for designing and building biophysically detailed models of neurons and neural ensembles.

This course consists of two workshops which focus on the need for reproducibility in science, particularly under the umbrella roadmap of FAIR scienctific principles. The tutorials also provide an introduction to some of the most commonly used open-source scientific tools, including Git, GitHub, Google Colab, Binder, Docker, and the programming languages Python and R. 

As technological improvements continue to facilitate innovations in the mental health space, researchers and clinicians are faced with novel opportunities and challenges regarding study design, diagnoses, treatments, and follow-up care. This course includes a lecture outlining these new developments, as well as a workshop which introduces users to Synapse, an open-source platform for collaborative data analysis. 

Neuromatch Academy aims to introduce traditional and emerging tools of computational neuroscience to trainees.

The emergence of data-intensive science creates a demand for neuroscience educators worldwide to deliver better neuroinformatics education and training in order to raise a generation of modern neuroscientists with FAIR capabilities, awareness of the value of standards and best practices, knowledge in dealing with big datasets, and the ability to integrate knowledge over multiple scales and methods.

Get up to speed about the fundamental principles of full brain network modeling using the open-source neuroinformatics platform The Virtual Brain (TVB). This simulation environment enables the biologically realistic modeling of whole-brain network dynamics across different brain scales, using personalized structural connectome-based approach.

As models in neuroscience have become increasingly complex, it has become more difficult to share all aspects of models and model analysis, hindering model accessibility and reproducibility. In this session, we will discuss existing resources for promoting FAIR data and models in computational neuroscience, their impact on the field, and remaining barriers.

This course consists of one lesson and one tutorial, focusing on the neural connectivity measures derived from neuroimaging, specifically from methods like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI). Additional tools such as tractography and parcellation are discussed in the context of brain connectivity and mental health. The tutorial leads participants through the computation of brain connectomes from fMRI data. 

This course is currently under construction but will coming soon.  It will give an overview of the world of scientific publishing, spanning from traditional formats, to open to access, to open, interactive, reproducible, and 'living' publications with modifiable and executable code.

Sessions from the INCF Neuroinformatics Assembly 2022 day 1. 

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This course contains sessions from the second day of INCF's Neuroinformatics Assembly 2022.

Ethical conduct of science, good governance of data, and accelerated translation to the clinic are key to high-calibre open neuroscience.  Everyday practitioners of science must be sensitized to a range of ethical considerations in their research, some having especially to do with open data-sharing. The lessons included in this course introduce a number of these topics and end with concrete guidance for participant consent and de-identification of data.

This workshop delves into the need for, structure of, tools for, and use of hierarchical event descriptor (HED) annotation to prepare neuroimaging time series data for storing, sharing, and advanced analysis. HED are a controlled vocabulary of terms describing events in a machine-actionable form so that algorithms can use the information without manual recoding.

Neuroanatomy provides one of the unifying frameworks for neuroscience and thus it is not surprising that it provides the basis for many neuroinformatics tools and approaches.  Regardless of whether one is working at the subcellular, cellular or gross anatomical level or whether one is modeling circuitry, molecular pathways or function, at some point, this work will include an anatomical reference.

This course includes two tutorials on R, a programming language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. R provides a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modelling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering, etc.) and graphical techniques, and is highly extensible.

The Neurodata Without Borders: Neurophysiology project (NWB, https://www.nwb.org/) is an effort to standardize the description and storage of neurophysiology data and metadata. NWB enables data sharing and reuse and reduces the energy-barrier to applying data analytics both within and across labs. Several laboratories, including the Allen Institute for Brain Science, have wholeheartedly adopted NWB.

This course tackles the issue of maintaining ethical research and healthcare practices in the age of increasingly powerful technological tools like machine learning and artificial intelligence. While there is great potential for innovation and improvement in the clinical space thanks to AI development, lecturers in this course advocate for a greater emphasis on human-centric care, calling for algorithm design which takes the full intersectionality of individuals into account.

Neuroscience has traditionally been a discipline where isolated labs have produced their own experimental data and created their own models to interpret their findings. However, it is becoming clear that no one lab can create cell and network models rich enough to address all the relevant biological questions, or to generate and analyse all the data required to inform, constrain, and test these models.

Bayesian inference (using prior knowledge to generate more accurate predictions about future events or outcomes) has become increasingly applied to the fields of neuroscience and neuroinformatics. In this course, participants are taught how Bayesian statistics may be used to build cognitive models of processes like learning or perception. This course also offers theoretical and practical instruction on dynamic causal modeling as applied to fMRI and EEG data.