The NIH Meeting on Informatics for Data and Resource Discovery in Addiction Research will be held from July 8 – 9, 2010. It will be held at the Neuroscience Center Building – Conference Room C and D in Rockville, Maryland. For more information, please visit: http://www.seiservices.com/nida/1014080/

Addiction research is amassing increasing amounts of complex data, and creating greater numbers and types of research resources, ranging from software tools and chemical reagents to animal models, images, biomarkers, biological and behavioral assays, biomaterial repositories, specialized data sources, and web portals; however, most remain hidden in unstructured or semi-structured sources such as journal articles or web pages centered on particular laboratories, institutions or grants. Concurrently, the broader biomedical research community is developing additional tools and data which also can inform and advance addiction research. With over 1500 different databases, alone, useful to neuroscientists, how do addiction researchers find, query, compare, relate, and employ appropriate data and resources efficiently and effectively? Equally important, how do they collect, report and share their own data and resources to make them interoperable and discoverable beyond a single research paper or web posting? To foster knowledge growth in this complex environment, informaticians are turning to resource registries, data federation, semantic tools and other approaches to enable data and resource discovery and analyses, as well as hypothesis generation and testing.

Who Should Attend: Developers, generators, providers, and users of biomedical and biobehavioral research data and resources at the post-doctoral level and beyond, representing a new cadre of addiction investigators enthusiastic about interconnecting data, knowledge and resources to advance substance abuse research are especially encouraged to attend.

This instructional workshop will address the following:

• Introduction to tools and methods for discovering data and resources available to addiction researchers
• Barriers to data and resource discovery and use
• Application of best practices in structuring, identifying, presenting and reporting data and resources to enhance their discovery and interoperability
• Enabling concept based queries through community adopted vocabularies
• Case studies and lessons to be learned from major efforts in other areas of neuroscience research
• Exciting new approaches for tying together statements made in scientific publications or on the Web to scientific evidence, biological terminologies, and knowledge bases, and to claims and counterclaims made by other researchers.
• Roundtable discussion of discoverability and potential interoperability of data and resources described in “speed-talks” by attendees

The CCDB just released 3 beautiful large scale brain mosaics detailing the distribution of plasma membrane calcium-dependent ATPases in rat brain published in the study by Kenyon et al. (Journal of Comparative Neurology, in press, electronic version available DOI: 10.1002/cne.22439).  For more information or to view the data set, please visit http://ccdb.ucsd.edu/index.shtm.  You may also wish to try out our Web Image Browser, a new tool for browsing and annotating large microscopic imaging data sets through the web. The WIB allows users to turn off and on different channels and adjust contrast through a web browser.

There will be a discussion period involving the Shared Names Project and the NCBO BioPortal.

An informative session and demonstration on the usage of NIF will be held this Friday,  June 4th, 2010. Please join us to learn strategies on finding software tools, reagents, ko-mice, and data!

Date and Time: Friday, June 4, 2010

11:30 AM – 1:00 PM Demonstration & Pizza
1:00 PM – 2:30 PM Open Discussion With NIF Team Members

Topic: Introduction to NIF
Location: UCSD Leichtag Biomedical Building, Room 107

This session is open to students, researchers, and educators!  Free pizza will be available for attendees.

View the NIF Flyer

We hope to see you there!

The Bioimage Informatics 2010 will be held from September 17 to19 at the new Gates and Hillman Centers of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.

It will bring together researchers working at the intersection of bioimaging, computer science, engineering and biological sciences. Researchers will discuss applications of image analysis, computer vision, data mining, machine learning, visualization, and informatics methods to mechanistic analyses of biological systems. Discussion will also cover emerging technologies in biology that are leading to new and complex image data sets that require image informatics.

There is a current call for abstracts (Oral and Poster Presentation), deadline July 1, 2010.

Abstracts for presentations, posters or software/hardware demonstrations related to all aspects of bioimage data mining and informatics, are welcome. Appropriate topics include but are not limited to:

• Bioimage feature measurement, description, extraction, and selection
• Object segmentation and tracking in bioimages
• Object/pattern recognition and understanding in bioimages
• Bioimage ontology and related data mining
• Bioimage data visualization
• Learning models from bioimages
• Other bioimaging related techniques, including transmission, compression, registration, storage, database, etc.
• Tools/software for bioimage data processing and data mining
• Bioimage related biology, bioinformatics, and biomedicine applications, e.g. 3D protein structure reconstruction, gene regulatory network/pathway modeling, etc.
• Joint analysis using both bioimages and other data (e.g. sequences, microarray, protein interaction, etc.)

Abstract Submission: Interested participants should electronically submit an abstract via email no later than July 1, 2010 following the instructions at http://lane.compbio.cmu.edu/bii2010. The abstracts will be reviewed and the authors will be notified of abstracts selected for oral or poster presentation by July 30.

Registration Information: All participants, including invited speakers, will be expected to cover their own expenses and registration fees. A range of housing options will be available. The registration fee of $90 will include an opening mixer, coffee and tea during session breaks, lunches, and a closing cookout on Sunday evening. Optional social events, including one highlighting the history of robotics in Pittsburgh (home of the Robot Hall of Fame) are planned.

Important Dates

June 01, 2010: Opening of registration site.
July 01, 2010: Deadline for abstract submission.
July 30, 2010: Notification of acceptance.
August 17, 2010: End of early registration.
September 17, 2010: Meeting opens.

For more information, please visit http://lane.compbio.cmu.edu/bii2010.

The German INCF Node in Munich will be covering “Neuroinformatics: Linking Brain Research from Physiology to Models” at their next symposium held on June 17.

The symposium will feature a number of exciting talks by renowned scientists, exploring how neuroinformatics can contribute to progress in neuroscience. We look forward to bringing together an interested audience from the INCF Nodes and the National Bernstein Network Computational Neuroscience to discuss issues of analysis, data sharing, and interactions between experimental and computational approaches in neurophysiology. In addition to the talks and discussion, there will be a poster session. All attendants are welcome to present a poster.

To register, please send a brief email to symposium2010@g-node.org. Please indicate if you would like to present a poster. Detailed information will be available at http://www.g-node.org/symposium2010.

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G-Node Inaugural Symposium

NIF Version 2.5 is now released.  Please visit the list of top features.

Please provide your valuable feedback by sending an email to support@neuinfo.org.  Thank you.

The XNAT Workshop 2010 will be held from June 28 – 30.

It will provide an opportunity for XNAT site administrators and developers to deepen their understanding of the XNAT system. The Workshop will begin with sessions focused on successfully deploying XNAT in a range of research environments and will proceed to sessions focused on customizing and extending XNAT and on building client applicatins that interface with XNAT. The workshop will be divided into didactic presentation, breakout discussion, and practical working time.

It will be located at the Connor Auditorium, Farrell Learning and Teaching Center (map)
Washington University School of Medicine
St. Louis, MO

Topics to look forward to:

• Installation and basic setup
• Best practices for multi-site studies and institutional deployments
• Tuning, optimization, and monitoring
• Integrating with DICOM devices (modalities, PACS, workstations)
• Customizing XNAT
• Creating XNAT pipelines
• Building XNAT clients
• Building new XNAT features / open source development
• Interfacing with external applications
• Gripe session
• Ad hoc breakout discussions

A detailed agenda is coming soon.

Registration for the event is $100. Workshop materials and breakfast/lunch will be covered.
Please go here to register.

Hotel Options:
The Parkway Hotel: It’s a 5 minute walk to the meeting. When making reservations, ask for the XNAT Workshop rate ($119).
The Chase Park Plaza: A nicer hotel. It’s a 10 minute walk to the meeting.