Data Sharing for Computational Neuroscience
- PDF / 136,279 Bytes
- 9 Pages / 593.972 x 792 pts Page_size
- 40 Downloads / 200 Views
Data Sharing for Computational Neuroscience Jeffrey L. Teeters & Kenneth D. Harris & K. Jarrod Millman & Bruno A. Olshausen & Friedrich T. Sommer
Received: 9 January 2008 / Accepted: 10 January 2008 / Published online: 8 February 2008 # Humana Press Inc. 2008
Abstract Computational neuroscience is a subfield of neuroscience that develops models to integrate complex experimental data in order to understand brain function. To constrain and test computational models, researchers need access to a wide variety of experimental data. Much of those data are not readily accessible because neuroscientists fall into separate communities that study the brain at different levels and have not been motivated to provide data to researchers outside their community. To foster sharing of neuroscience data, a workshop was held in 2007, bringing together experimental and theoretical neuroscientists, computer scientists, legal experts and governmental observers. Computational neuroscience was recommended as an ideal field for focusing data sharing, and specific methods, strategies and policies were suggested for achieving it. A new funding area in the NSF/NIH Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience (CRCNS) program has been established to support data sharing, guided in part by the workshop recommendations. The new funding area is dedicated to the dissemination of high quality data sets with maximum scientific value for computational neuroscience. The first round of the CRCNS data sharing program supports the preparation of data sets J. L. Teeters : K. J. Millman : B. A. Olshausen : F. T. Sommer (*) Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience & Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley, 3210F Tolman Hall, MC 3192, Berkeley, CA 94720-3192, USA e-mail: [email protected] K. D. Harris Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 197 University Avenue, Newark, NJ 07102, USA
which will be publicly available in 2008. These include electrophysiology and behavioral (eye movement) data described towards the end of this article. Keywords Computational neuroscience . Data sharing . Electrophysiology . Online data repositories . Computational models . Hippocampus . Sensory systems . Eye movements . Visual cortex
Introduction Many aspects of brain function that are currently unexplained could potentially be understood if a culture of data sharing were established in neuroscience. The fields of computational neuroscience and systems neuroscience seek to elucidate the information processing strategies employed by neural circuits in the brain. In spite of intense investigation in these areas over many decades, fundamental problems are still unsolved. For example, the question of how brains can perceive and navigate so robustly, even under rich and highly variable real-world conditions, or the question of how sensation and action interact, or how brain function relies on concerted neural activity across scales, remain complete mysteries. Tackling these and oth
Data Loading...
