From August 31 to 2 September 2019, members of the Human Brain Project travelled to Warsaw, Poland for the annual assembly of the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF).

Hands-on training

On Saturday, researchers affiliated with the Human Brain Project organised three hands-on workshops at the University of Warsaw leading up to Neuroinformatics 2019, and introduced participants to different tools and services developed in the HBP. In the Short Course: Simulating the brain with the Brain Simulation Platform (BSP) chaired by Michele Migliore (CNR), attendees learned how to use the Platform and access high-performance computing systems to configure and run simulations, visualise and analyse results, and form collaborative groups interested in exploring scientific issues of common interest.

The Virtual Brain (TVB) Workshop was organised by the TVB team surrounding Petra Ritter (Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin) and was dedicated to a theoretical and practical understanding of large-scale brain network modelling using the open-source neuroinformatics platform The Virtual Brain.

Experts from HBP teams at the University of Oslo and Forschungszentrum Jülich taught participants how to Navigate complex neuroanatomy and integrate neuroscience data using 3D brain atlases in their workshop. Students were introduced to key concepts and methods underlying the HBP Research Infrastructure for data sharing, and learned how neuroscience data from different disciplines can be combined, integrated, visualised and analysed using 3D reference atlases.

Meet the experts

During the Neuroinformatics 2019 conference, there was a dedicated HBP booth and demo station where conference attendees got to meet experts from different areas and learn about Data Management & Curation in the HBP, the Elephant tool, image segmentation, the Waxholm Space atlas of the rat brain, atlas registration, atlas integration of murine data, and the Virtual Brain.

HBP Infrastructure Operations Director Jan Bjaalie contributed to the conference programme by giving a keynote lecture on day 2 of Neuroinformatics 2019. The talk described the Project’s user-driven data sharing and data management infrastructure for neuroscience, which is publicly accessible through the HBP Knowledge Graph Search.

Posters & networking

The conference evenings were dedicated to poster presentations and demo sessions co-sponsored by the HBP. Contributions from the Project invited visitors to learn more about the work of the different teams in a casual atmosphere, and experts were available to sit down for informal chats in the networking area.