INCF/OCNS Software WG

The INCF/OCNS Software Working Group

WG meeting 14 February 2022


Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash.


These are the meeting logs from the Software WG meeting that was held on 14th February, 2022. The next progress meeting will be held in March. For any clarifications and suggestions, please open a new ticket.

Attendees

  • Ankur Sinha (University College London)
  • Malin Sandström (INCF)
  • Akash Mishra (Independent Researcher)
  • Felix B. Kern (University of Tokyo)

Regrets

  • Shailesh Appukuttan (on leave)

Minutes

Tutorial survey form

We’ve been working on the tutorials survey form. This is a work in progress, and the discussion can be seen on this GitHub ticket:

https://github.com/OCNS/SoftwareWG/issues/57

It is expected to be sent out to various mailing lists early next week, and the results to be discussed at the next WG progress meeting.

CNS 2022 tutorials

Tutorials at CNS*2022 have been announced, with the submission deadline on 15th of April. We discussed what tutorials we, the working group, can organise.

  • Malin will speak to Fleur about topics/syllabus for the tutorial.
  • An idea is to keep tutorials tool agnostic, and then feed into different simulator specific tutorials.
  • Neuromatch Academy (NMA) probably happen in July again: https://academy.neuromatch.io/
  • We need to figure out what it is we want to teach before we can come up with a syllabus and assign tasks.
    • Ideally, we want to find a sweet spot that avoids both generic computational neuroscience teaching and generic tool basics.
  • A repeat of last year’s tutorials may be acceptable.

Additionally:

  • We discussed setting up a resource that lists various tools and their use cases/features. The aim is to give users a quick way to find the appropriate tool for their task.
  • There’s the NeuroTech mind map, and we should add a tools section to the CompNeuro bits:

WG diversity

  • https://github.com/OCNS/SoftwareWG/issues/58
  • We will reach out to neuroscience groups on Discord and Reddit and get some of the members involved in OCNS to increase our diversity.
    • We could try to recruit from computational neuroscience communities with more diversity, like Neuromatch.
    • Outreachy: where we can get stipends for candidates from the Wellcome Trust.
    • Brainhack, and all other communities that we can connect with.

INCF Assembly workshop

https://www.incf.org/blog/call-incf-assembly-workshop-themes

  • Idea: adopt some of the existing ideas and best practices in DevOps to Neuroscience data life cycle
  • propose birds of a feather sessions
    • diversity and inclusion
    • tool developers in neuroscience
    • education/training
  • the INCF training weeks will happen separately for specific training sessions

Since the meeting, we have submitted two workshop proposals to the INCF Assembly:

  • A session on increasing diversity and inclusion in Neuroscience/Neuroinformatics.
  • A session showcasing software used in Neuroscience.