February 14, 2020 Conference Call, 3-4pm ET

MINUTES

1. Introductions

Attendees:

Grace Peng, Susan Wright, Bei Wang Phillips, Bill Lytton, Brent Doiron, Dario Ringach, David Carlson, Elizabeth Powell, Fidel Santamaria, Fritz Sommer, Kanaka Rajan, Larry Snyder, Linus Manubens-Gil, Matt Smith, Pew-Thian Yap, Shaul Druckmann, ShiNung Ching, Srdjan Antic, Sri Nagarajan, Thilo Womelsdorf, Vinod Menon, Bing Ye, Adrian Arias Abreau, Kanaka Rajan, Friedrich Sommer, Bing Ye, Emery Brown

Welcome Dr. Susan Wright from NIDA who will be working with Dr. Grace Peng on organizing TMM activities!

2. IMAG wiki walk around

Please use wiki - request an account if you don't already have one and help to populate the pages. 

Look around and get comfortable with working on the wiki.

Would be great to include DOIs for publications when filling in forms.

Resource credibility assessment - conformance level - rate your own - fine to be insufficient. Once it is all filled out, others can see how you've assessed credibility for your model. You can go back and edit. 

The timeline for this is that we would like to have this all posted by the time of the PI meeting, which is in June. The sooner you can get these pages uploaded, the sooner we can tell people about your work. There is also a page where you can post your publications. So, the sooner the better...but you have time. If you don't have time, encourage you to assign someone to help you do it. 

There is a FAQ page if you have questions/need help.

You are encouraged to add links from the wiki in your RPPR.

***When you create a login, choose MSM members, not IMAG member to give maximum flexibility to display models. If you have something really big/splashy, you can display it as a highlight. 

Some people are hesitant to post because it is a public thing, but it is as public as you want to make it. 

We can make it structured like a website but really these pages are hidden.

Grace and NIH folks pull information from the wiki to show to others (especially Congress)

BRAIN Initiative Alliance website:  https://www.braininitiative.org/

• Daniela Witten's video:  https://www.braininitiative.org/2019/02/21/a-statistician-and-a-neuroscientist-walk-into-a-brain-grant-stories-from-early-career-brain-scientists/
• It would be great to get us here:  https://www.braininitiative.org/achievements/

NIH BRAIN Initiative website:  https://braininitiative.nih.gov/

3. BRAIN PI meeting:  May 31^st, June 1-3, 2020

Have been bugging the planners about how to show off your tools/deliverables. This year they are excited to give us a central exhibit within this hotel - they want us to decide what to do with it but it could be a big plasma screen that continuously loops through with flyers as handouts and we would highlight the theories, models and methods tools. Then there is another area they've set aside for us - down the stairs near the bar - everyone needs to go past it. We were brainstorming about how to spread out across the four rooms - like exhibitors - with laptops showing demos of your tools. That's just the first brainstorm idea - you are welcome to have others. Even if your project isn't completed, you may have a demo to show.

Suggestion to have it at a time that the experimentalists can see it.

Examples of deliverables:

• Emery Brown – Ca Imaging technique – showing inference to technique, poster
• Fidel Santamaria – electronic implementation of theories in motion, brochure on how to apply the theory in other fields, explain mathematical concepts
• Brent Dorion – Bayesian methods of parameter fitting of population spike trains, poster that talk about science, brochure describing the data required and model
• Bill Lytton – tools for MSM, Neuron simulator NetPyNE, interactive

Best ways to display:

-Space to have smaller conversations - could have laptop conversations

-Posters are separate from these exhibits

-Show whatever you what people/stakeholders to use

-Have demo that allows people to pretend to be using it/look under the hood to see what you are doing

-Seems to be agreement about having plasma screen looping through

-Request group posters together (theories, models, methods)

-If there's no ordering by systems, might be good to have theories co-located

Pre-meeting - May 31st is the pre-meeting for all of you to come together in person and June 1-3 is the actual BRAIN PI meeting. 

Would you want to get together to share ideas? Basically mixing and matching the rooms based on what you want to do. Guess it depends on what the U19 people want to do. Could be a benefit to seeing what just the people in our group want to do...could also be a benefit in reaching out to the U19 group to see what they are doing.

The U19 group also has a wiki page. They are a U group - the TMM group is an R. (Showed modeling subgroup slides that showed how they grouped themselves into domains of study.)

Each U19 has its own data science core but also has its own modeling core that is supposed to drive the project. They have a definite mandate to study the circuit using all means possible. 

Talking to each other sounds fun - seems to be common interests. We have less than 4 months before the meeting - do we want to have another call before the meeting or mostly do things online and gather data? 

Depends on the U19 - would also be fun to have the modelers in the room with us. Maybe not all of them but at least the people who do the theory - think that would be quite an overlap. 

Decision for pre-meeting:  flash presentations from all TMM projects, networking time along with U19 modelers and theorists.

Central Exhibit - template slide to loop continuously during main meeting

Room Exhibits - 3 rooms across from the hotel bard

Hands on experience? Interface, laptop, electronic poster board, classic poster board, larger monitors to plug in to laptop, white board for discussions/ideas, paper, tables, chairs

ACTION ITEMS:

• Create and edit Central Exhibit template slide before completing and posting
• Grace and Susan will create wiki pages for all TMM projects
• All TMM grantees:
  • create a IMAG wiki login
  • post TMM deliverable using the Models, Tools and Databases form
  • post publications, model simulations, etc on your project page
• Grace and Susan will create wiki pages for 2020 BRAIN PI meeting as a "staging site" for the PI meeting