Tales from the Open Source Brain kick-off
A contingent from OpenWorm attended the recent Open Source Brain kick-off meeting organized by the Silver Lab (UCL) in Alghero, Sardinia.
The main goal of the meeting was to launch Open Source Brain (OSB): an awesome resource to share and visualize open neuronal models, created at the SIlver Lab. What makes OSB even more interesting is that in future it will be possible to run web-based neuronal simulations of the available models.
Open Source Brain is dear to our worm hearts for many reasons - first because it wants to promote sharing of open models and, second, because it re-uses Geppetto, the open simulation engine we are building to simulate THE OpenWorm.
An OpenWorm progress report poster was presented at the meeting, with highlights being the NeuroML spatial connectome of C. elegans also available via the OSB visualizer and a progress report on the recent efforts to integrate electrophysiology and fluid mechanics (codename “electrofluid”), first steps to obtain a complete simulation of the C. elegans motor system.
Besides open collaborative development of neuronal models, the other main theme of the meeting turned out being computational models of the cerebellum. There also was a notable talk from Richard Gerkin who presented neuroUnit - an integrated framework to test neuronal models against experimental data - and as a consequence it was refreshing to hear scientists debate about unit-testing of their models. More of this please.
In conclusion, this meeting was pretty darn great: great people, great location (just look at the pictures), great food.
The worms approve!
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