The next NIF Webinar will be held on Tuesday, February 7, 2012 at 11:00 am PST.   Please join Carlo Quinonez as he discusses Open Hardware in Science: Benefits and Challenges.

The following is a description of the webinar:

The need for free and easy access to scientific data and other information essential to scientific experiments has been clearly recognized for decades. Developments such as open source software, open data, open access journals and open courseware rely on the easy and efficient transfer of information over the Internet. However, the dissemination and collaborative development of open hardware for the benefit of scientific progress poses unique challenges and opportunities. The widespread prevalence of scientist-developed tools has been driven by commercial instruments’ lack of flexibility and detailed engineering data vital for user-improvements. While these technologies are put to good use by their developers, practical issues such as poor documentation, difficulty of fabrication, and idiosyncratic operation typically limit the utility to broader research community. In this webinar we will discuss the open hardware toolset, Aquinas, that addresses some of these issues and provides a shared hardware platform for biological experimentation. Currently, several micro-fluidics designs are available for fabrication. The facile reproduction of scientist-developed tools improves the reproducibility and transparency of science overall. Furthermore, a shared hardware platform for biological experimentation would also propel large-scale collaborative efforts to significantly accelerate the discovery of cures and scientific breakthroughs.

Date and Time: Tuesday, February 7, 2011 • 11:00-12:00 PST
Topic: OpenHardware in Science: Benefits and Challenges
Presenter: Carlo Quinonez, Ph.D., IRACDA Fellow in the Department of Pharmacology, University of California, San Diego.
URL: http://connect.neuinfo.org/webinar
Dial-In (toll-free): 866-740-1260
Access Code: 8220739

Mark your calendars! See you there.

The Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF) hosts a semi-regular Tuesday Webinar series on topics focused on collaborating with NIF, getting involved in building the NIF vocabulary, using NIF portal resources, as well as other appropriate NIF topics.

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NIF Communications Team
UC San Diego
3rd Floor, Atkinson Hall
9500 Gilman Drive, MC 0446
La Jolla, California 92093

858-822-0755
http://www.neuinfo.org

The next NIF Webinar will be held on Tuesday, November 1, 2011 at 11:00 am PDT.   Please join Tal Yarkoni as he discusses the NeuroSynth framework.

The following is a description of the webinar:

The explosive growth of the human neuroimaging literature has led to major advances in understanding of human brain function, but has also made aggregation and synthesis of neuroimaging findings increasingly difficult. In this webinar, I will describe a highly automated brain mapping framework called NeuroSynth that uses text mining, meta-analysis and machine learning techniques to generate a large database of mappings between neural and cognitive states. The NeuroSynth framework can be used to automatically conduct large-scale, high-quality neuroimaging meta-analyses, address long-standing inferential problems in the neuroimaging literature (e.g., how to infer cognitive states from distributed activity patterns), and support accurate ‘decoding’ of broad cognitive states from brain activity in both entire studies and individual human subjects. This webinar will focus on (a) the methods used to extract the data, (b) the structure of the resulting (publicly available) datasets, and (c) some major limitations of the current implementation. If time allows, I’ll also provide a walk-through of the associated web interface (http://neurosynth.org) and will provide concrete examples of some potential applications of the framework.

Date and Time: Tuesday,November 1, 2011 • 11:00-12:00 PDT
Topic: Large-scale automated synthesis of functional neuroimaging data using the NeuroSynth framework
Presenter: Tal Yarkoni
URL: http://connect.neuinfo.org/webinar
Dial-In (toll-free): 866-740-1260
Access Code: 8220739

Mark your calendars! See you there.

The Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF) hosts a semi-regular Tuesday Webinar series on topics focused on collaborating with NIF, getting involved in building the NIF vocabulary, using NIF portal resources, as well as other appropriate NIF topics.

--
NIF Communications Team
UC San Diego
3rd Floor, Atkinson Hall
9500 Gilman Drive, MC 0446
La Jolla, California 92093

858-822-0755
http://www.neuinfo.org

The next NIF Webinar will be held on Tuesday, October 25, 2011 at 11:00 am PDT.   Please join Jesse Brown as he discusses The UCLA Multimodal Connectivity Database.

The following is a description of the webinar:

The UCLA Multimodal Connectivity Database (UMCD; http://umcd.ccn.ucla.edu) is a new web-based effort to collect, categorize, and share connectivivty matrices that have been dervied from neuroimaging data. As the number of macroscopic brain connectivity studies has rapidly expanded and the number of publications has grown, the need for a repository for such data has become vital. The UMCD specifically caters to data from studies that have derived whole brain connectivity matrices to quantify the pairwise connection strength between any pair of regions in the brain. Connection strength can be determined using structural or functional measures of connection strength, such as diffusion tensory imaging tractography track density or functional MRI timeseries correlation. We designed the UMCD in order to make it easy to share connectivity matrices with sufficient meta information to make them searchable and visualizable by anyone who is interested. Any user can visit the site, browse all the publicly shared data, choose a network of interest based on a variety of criteria (age, disorder, imaging modality, etc.), and then analzye the network. This analysis is run on the fly in the cloud, quickly producing a report on the network’s global and local connectivity properties. Both interactive 3D and 2D visualizations are shown that depict the connection strengths and various regional properties. We hope that through data sharing on the UMCD, we will 1) enable large scale meta-analyses and classification efforts of connectivity matrix data, 2) provide prior probabilities for future experiments probing connectivity between specific regions, 3) sync up with other databases in an effort to synthesize brain connectivity data at the micro and macroscale. In this presentation I will demonstrate how to share data on the site, find specific data, and run an analysis of  publicly shared data.

Date and Time: Tuesday,October 25, 2011 • 11:00-12:00 PDT
Topic: The UCLA Multimodal Connectivity Database
Presenter: Jesse Brown
URL: http://connect.neuinfo.org/webinar
Dial-In (toll-free): 866-740-1260
Access Code: 8220739

Mark your calendars! See you there.

The Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF) hosts a semi-regular Tuesday Webinar series on topics focused on collaborating with NIF, getting involved in building the NIF vocabulary, using NIF portal resources, as well as other appropriate NIF topics.

--
NIF Communications Team
UC San Diego
3rd Floor, Atkinson Hall
9500 Gilman Drive, MC 0446
La Jolla, California 92093

858-822-0755
http://www.neuinfo.org

The next NIF Webinar will be held on Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 11:00 am PDT.   Please join Bobby-Joe Breitkreutz as he discusses Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

The following is a description of the webinar:

The “tree falls in a forest” adage postulates that if no one is around to hear the sound, it may not exist at all. This translates perfectly to search engines and web content. Major search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo! do a great job of helping people find your content on the web. However, they can only do this if they know your website exists and more importantly can determine how to navigate it successfully. So, in order for humans to discover, react, comment and, most importantly for search engines, link to your website, you need to be sure the search engines can process your content completely and accurately. If someone makes a website and no one can find it, does it exist at all?

Date and Time: Tuesday,October 11, 2011 • 11:00-12:00 PDT
Topic: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Presenter: Bobby-Joe Breitkreutz
URL: http://connect.neuinfo.org/webinar
Dial-In (toll-free): 866-740-1260
Access Code: 8220739

Mark your calendars! See you there.

The Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF) hosts a semi-regular Tuesday Webinar series on topics focused on collaborating with NIF, getting involved in building the NIF vocabulary, using NIF portal resources, as well as other appropriate NIF topics.

--
NIF Communications Team
UC San Diego
3rd Floor, Atkinson Hall
9500 Gilman Drive, MC 0446
La Jolla, California 92093

858-822-0755
http://www.neuinfo.org

Hello everyone,

The next NIF Webinar is scheduled for Tuesday, April 26, 2011 at 11:00 am PDT. Please join David Orloff as we talk about the The Cell: An Image Library™. The challenges of creating a public repository of images encompass, political, legal, and technological arenas. There is also the challenge of making the resource a valuable tool for both qualitative and quantitative analysis. Dr. Orloff will discuss these challenges, as well as, the use of multiple ontologies for annotation and what to do when there is no appropriate ontology.

Date and Time: Tuesday, April 12, 2011 • 11:00-12:00 PST
Topic: The Cell: An Image Library™
Presenter: David Orloff
URL: http://connect.neuinfo.org/webinar
Dial-In (toll-free): 866-740-1260
Access Code: 8220739

Mark your calendars! See you there.

Hello everyone,

The next NIF Webinar is scheduled for Tuesday, April 12, 2011 at 11:00 am PDT. Please join Jonathan Cachat & Luis Marenco as we talk about the DISCO service. DISCO is an information integration approach designed to facilitate interoperation among Internet resources. It consists of a set of tools and services (e.g. sitemaps, LinkOut Broker) that allows resource providers who maintain information to share it with automated systems such as NIF. NIF is then able to “harvest” the information and keep that information up-to-date.

NIF has recently implemented DISCO to facilitate interoperability between resourcesand the NIF system. Join us as we introduce these DISCO services, overview the DISCO dashboard and discuss proper configuration of DISCO files. Once established, NIF will then be able to harvest resource data ensuring that the most up-to-date information is available to our community.

Date and Time: Tuesday, April 12, 2011 • 11:00-12:00 PST
Topic: DISCO Service
Presenter: Jonathan Cachat & Luis Marenco
URL: http://connect.neuinfo.org/webinar
Dial-In (toll-free): 866-740-1260
Access Code: 8220739

Mark your calendars! See you there.

Hello everyone,

The next NIF Webinar is scheduled for Tuesday, March 29, 2011. Please join Dr. Gully Burns from University of Southern California as he describes KEfED, Knowledge Engineering from Experimental Design. The project describes an approach to building a Knowledge Representation for scientific observations. This approach is designed to provide a lightweight representation for scientific knowledge that is (a) generalizable, (b) a suitable target for text-mining approaches, (c) relatively semantically simple, and (d) is based on the way that scientist plan experiments and should therefore be intuitively understandable to non-computational bench scientists. The team has constructed a web-application as a preliminary instantiation of this approach to demonstrate its feasibility and to gather feedback from the community.

Date and Time: Tuesday, March 29, 2011 • 11:00-12:00 PST
Topic: KEfED – Knowledge Engineering from Experimental Design
Presenter: Gully Burns
URL: http://connect.neuinfo.org/webinar
Dial-In (toll-free): 866-740-1260
Access Code: 8220739

Mark your calendars! See you there.

Hello everyone,

The next NIF Webinar is scheduled for Tuesday, March 15, 2011. Please join Dr. Paolo Ciccarese from Harvard University as he describes the SWAN Annotation Tool and Annotation Ontology. The SWAN Annotation Tool is a web application for producing annotation of online documents and document fragments. The tool allows to define personal annotation, public annotation and annotation that can be accessed only by a selected group of users. The SWAN Annotation Tool is developed in parallel with the Annotation Ontology (AO) an OWL vocabulary for representing and sharing annotation. AO is designed to extensively reuse existing domain ontologies (entities annotations or semantic tags) and to provide several other kind of annotations – comments, textual annotation (classic tags), notes, examples, erratum… – on potentially any kind of resource (text, images, audio, databases…) and resource fragment.

Date and Time: Tuesday, March 15, 2011 • 11:00-12:00 PST
Topic: The SWAN Annotation Tool and Annotation Ontology
Presenter: Paolo Ciccarese
URL: http://connect.neuinfo.org/webinar
Dial-In (toll-free): 866-740-1260
Access Code: 8220739

Mark your calendars! See you there.

Hello everyone,

The next NIF Webinar is scheduled for Tuesday, February 15, 2011. Please join David J. Hamilton from George Mason University as we explore the NRCI – Neuron Registry Curator Interface. The NRCI is a web-based tool that provides interactive capability for entry of neuron properties to describe neuron types. It is designed to be easily learned and efficiently used. Neuron property descriptors are entered in the form of part-relation-value triples, as in “dendrites (are) located in molecular layer” so as to facilitate machine readability. The NRCI is being interfaced with NIF and other neuroinformatic resources to foster collaborative use and cross-contributions. This effort is sponsored by the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF) under the Program on Ontologies of Neural Structures (PONS).

Date and Time: Tuesday, Feburary 15, 2011 • 11:00-12:00 PST
Topic: NRCI – Neuron Registry Curator Interface
Presenter: David J. Hamilton
URL: http://connect.neuinfo.org/webinar
Dial-In (toll-free): 866-740-1260
Access Code: 8220739

Mark your calendars! See you there.

Hello everyone,

The next NIF Webinar is scheduled for Tuesday, February 1, 2011. Please join our own Dr. Anita Bandrowski as we reveal the new NIF 3.0 release. New features include a revamped interface and website, better incorporation of search on the website, improved usability and functionality of the advanced search, as well as integration of the Neurolex in search results.

Date and Time: Tuesday, Feburary 1, 2011 • 11:00-12:00 PST
Topic: NIF 3.0
Presenter: Dr. Anita Bandrowski
URL: http://connect.neuinfo.org/webinar
Dial-In (toll-free): 866-740-1260
Access Code: 8220739

Mark your calendars! See you there.