The goal of the CodeJam workshops is to catalyze open-source, collaborative software development in computational and systems neuroscience and neuroinformatics, by bringing together researchers, students and engineers to share ideas, present their work, and write code together. The general format of the workshops is to dedicate the mornings to invited and contributed talks, leaving the afternoons free for discussions and code sprints.

The 5th BrainScaleS/FACETS CodeJam will take place as a joint meeting with the NeuroML Development Workshop, with the theme "Convergence in Computational Neuroscience".

The NeuroML workshop is on 12th and 13th March with 14th March as a joint NeuroML-CodeJam day, including a

Mini-workshop on Convergence, Interoperability and Reuse in Neuroscience Modelling Software

Recent years have seen a number of significant developments in the way software technologies are used to support research in neuroscience. These include the advent of "meta-simulators" such as PyNN and NeuroConstruct, the development domain specific languages such as NeuroML and NineML, techniques for exploiting GPUs, the use of code generation within simulators, and the steady growth of databases such as ModelDB.

This workshop is open to anyone with an interest in reviewing and analyzing these and other developments in the field. Participants are invited to briefly present their own experiences and ideas with a focus on how these developments bear on the core problem of model sharing and reuse. It is anticipated that the presentations at the workshop will form the basis of a joint perspectives article setting out where we are at present and where we hope to be going over the next five years. Contributions highlighting trends and technologies that we should be thinking about but that most people are still unaware of, will be particularly welcome.

Please send a brief outline of what you wish to present to Robert Cannon: robert@textensor.com

Further details of the program will be announced soon.

The goal of the FACETS CodeJam workshops is to catalyze open-source, collaborative software development in computational and systems neuroscience and neuroinformatics, by bringing together researchers, students and engineers to share ideas, present their work, and write code together. The general format of the workshops is to dedicate the mornings to invited and contributed talks, leaving the afternoons free for discussions and code sprints.

For the 4th FACETS CodeJam, the main theme of the meeting was workflows: what are the best practices for combining different tools (simulators, analysis tools, visualization tools, databases etc.) to ensure the efficient and reproducible flow of data and information from experiment conception to publication and archiving?

The first CodeJam focused on adding or improving Python support for different neuroscience simulators, and on the PyNN common simulator API.

The focus for the second CodeJam was expanded to include the next stages in the simulation workflow - analysis and visualisation of simulation results, and management of simulation projects to promote reproducibility and reliability.

The third CodeJam, aimed to catalyze development on a broad range of topics, including simulator interoperability, modeling langauge standardization, parallelizaion, Python tool-chain & abstraction development to further erode the complexity barrier facing computational neuroscientists, and much more ...

The general format of the workshop was to dedicate the mornings to invited and contributed talks on topics relating to simulation and collaborative software development in computational and systems neuroscience, leaving the afternoons free for discussions and code sprints.

Python is rapidly becoming the ''de facto'' standard language for systems integration. Python has a large user and developer-base external to the neuroscience community, and a vast module library that facilitates rapid and maintainable development of complex and intricate systems.

In this workshop, we highlighted efforts to develop Python modules for the domain of neuroscience software and neuroinformatics. Moreover, we sought to provide a representative overview of existing mature Python modules for neuroscience and neuroinformatics, to demonstrate a critical mass and show that Python is an appropriate choice of interpreter interface for future neuroscience software development.

There was a tutorial+demo session where visitors with laptops could install and get introduced and aquainted with the various Python software.

Many of these efforts have been featured recently in a special issue of Frontiers in Neuroinformatics on "Python in neuroscience ".

http://www.cnsorg.org/meetings/2009/workshops/CNS2009%20Python%20workshop.pdf

The first CodeJam focused on adding or improving Python support for different neuroscience simulators, and on the PyNN common simulator API. The focus for the second CodeJam was expanded to include the next stages in the simulation workflow - analysis and visualisation of simulation results, and management of simulation projects to promote reproducibility and reliability.

The general format of the workshop was to dedicate the mornings to invited and contributed talks on topics relating to simulation and collaborative software development in computational and systems neuroscience, leaving the afternoons free for informal discussions and code sprints.

Trends in programming language development and adoption point to Python as the high-level systems integration language of choice. Python leverages a vast developer-base external to the Neuroscience community, and promises leaps in simulation complexity and maintainability to any neural simulator which adopts it. As more and more simulators support Python, model development times can be drastically reduced by promoting code sharing and reuse across simulator communities. As a result, modelers can devote their software development time to innovating new simulation tools such as network topology databases, stimulus programming, analysis and visualization tools, and simulation accounting, to name a few. A multilateral effort to coordinate and organize these development efforts into a larger meta-simulator software system is a natural and alternate approach to incrementally address what is known as the complexity bottleneck, presently a major roadblock for neural modeling. While a solution here is arguably a necessary condition for resolving the present stalemate for understanding the complexities of brain-like computing, a successful initiative could also end up being a major innovation of the field for the larger computing community.

The goal of the CodeJam meeting was to bring together the core group of developers and modelers presently working towards such a common set of meta-simulator tools implemented in Python. As there was much to discuss, the meeting was partly parallelized into "Focus Groups". Code sprints were scheduled to address outstanding developer issues. A small number of technical talks were scheduled to promote discussion on recent innovations. We discussed how software already implemented can be improved and adopted, while trying to avoid arguing about specifications of unimplemented software, leaving this honor to the volunteer who risks to prototype it first. The focus of the meeting was on innovation, communication, convergence, multilateralism, and realization (from the german: Umsetzung).

The original meeting webpage: https://facets.kip.uni-heidelberg.de/tmp_course/course_wiki/index.php/CodeJam_Heidelberg_April2007