Advanced Computational Neuroscience Network (ACNN) Spoke

Workshops

About

The Advanced Computational Neuroscience Network (ACNN) aims to educate a new generation of data-science-ready trainees and build broad consensus on the core requirements, infrastructure, and components needed to develop a sustainable interdisciplinary Big Data Neuroscience research field. As a network, ACNN leverages community strengths and resources to drive innovation and collaboration for the understanding of the structure, cellular and molecular components, physiology, and function of the brain through research collaborations and education activities. Founded over 8 years ago, the ACNN benefits from a large body of over 50 partners – among universities, industry partners, research centers and hospitals.

The ACNN partners provide expertise, and strong support to the creation of a sustainable neuroscience community that can effectively address the new challenges in Big Data Neuroscience by leveraging transdisciplinary expertise, informatics and educational resources. The ACNN partners represent aggregated neuroscience domain expertise, computational science, informatics, and resources focussed on different aspects of Big Data Neuroscience.

Midwest States Pole

• University of Michigan: Rich Gonzales (ACNN founder) and Ivo Dinov (ACNN founder)
• Ohio State University: Dhabaleswar Panda (ACNN founder) and Lei Wang (ACNN founder)
• Case Western Reserve University: Satya Sahoo (ACNN founder)
• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Sanmi Koyejo, Sepideh Sadaghiani, Brad Sutton

Southern States Pole

• Georgia State University: Jessica Turner
• University of Arkansas: Josiah Leong
• University of Texas at Austin: Franco Pestilli (ACNN founder) and Susanne Ressl
• University of Alabama: Sharlene Newman

Past Members

• Indiana University: Olaf Sporns and Andrew Saykin
• Washington University: Daniel Marcus
• University of Michigan: John E. Marcotte
• Ohio State University: Hari Subramoni
• University of California at Merced: Xiaoyi Lu
• Case Western Reserve University: Arthur Gershon

Resources

Software

• OSU NeuroHPC Project

Lectures

• Big Data to Knowledge Initiative lectures

This web-form can be used to submit items for inclusion in the sharable resources. Examples (not an exclusive list) of appropriate resources that may be suggested includes:

• Highly scalable APIs
• Relevant publications
• Cloud-services
• Computational Resources
• Algorithms, methods, techniques
• Education and Training Opportunities

You can see a real-time summary of the results and a tabular representation of previously submitted resource meta-data.

Training

An important component of the ACNN Spoke is its focus on training, education and diversity. With its strong and integrated programs in Neuroscience, Computer Science, and high performance computing resources, ACNN aims to build a skill cadre of young scientists by building innovative educational resources, interactive learning activities, sharing of powerful neuroscience data management tools, and online documentation and training manuals.

All partner universities are committed to extensive diversity, equity and engagement of minority and underserved populations including African-American, Hispanic, and Native American Populations. ACNN activities involve extensive efforts to recruit, train and engage underserved populations in our community building, training and education opportunities in the rapidly emerging neuroscience research domain.

See the Events page for details on various dissemination and training activities.

Partners & Collaborators

ACNN Investigators encourage junior and senior, academic and industry, government and foundation researchers interested in Big Neuroscience Data to contact us, actively engage in resource development and maintenance, contribute to standards and formats, and broadly participate in all ACNN activities.

University of Michigan

Statistics Online Computaitonal Resource (SOCR).

Indiana University

Northwestern University

Ohio State University

Case Western Reserve University

Washington University

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

News & Events

News

Events

The ACNN Spoke organizes annual neuroscience Big Data All Hands Meetings (AHM) that feature workshops, hackathons, training, and related events. These events are hosted at participating institutions. The annual events bring together a wide spectrum of stakeholders from research centers, educational institutions, and industry partners to build new partnerships and forge new collaborations across the Midwest region. A number of initiatives are planned for the AHM, including establishment of focused workgroups to establish best practices for neuroscience data interoperability, disseminate those practices and provide education about methods as well as technology for data analysis, computational management, and sharing. In addition, the meetings will feature public lectures, scientific talks as well as events targeting young trainees involved in neuroscience research. The AHM materials will be available on our web portal.

Smaller focused regional events are organized throughout the year.

Research

ACNN aspires to build the foundation for modern, Big Data neuroscience technologies through community partnership. Among the key challenges impeding greater accessibility and sharing of neuroscience data is the lack of community-approved common data representation formats and metadata elements. In addition, communication between computational resources and existing informatics tools is a significant bottleneck in faster and more computation-intensive neuroscience analysis tools. ACNN proposes to address three specific problems related to neuroscience Big Data:

1. data capture, organization, management involving multiple centers and research groups,
2. quality assurance, preprocessing and analysis that incorporates contextual metadata, and
3. data communication to software and hardware computational resources that can scale with the volume, velocity, and variety of neuroscience datasets.

More specifically, we plan to leverage the expertise and technologies developed by the ACNN Spoke investigators and our partners to integrate:

1. Data Sharing and Interoperability using ontology-driven standardization, provenance metadata management, integrated into the most modern database and database-mediator technologies. Deliverable: We will work toward a neuroimaging data base federation within the Midwest region by organizing and mediating data across the 20+ partner neuroimaging centers;
2. Analytics leveraging upon the most agreed upon preprocessing pipelines (LONI and HCP) and advanced network science approaches to brain mapping. Deliverable: We will integrate the Brain Connectivity Toolbox, the LONI, the SOCR and Human Connectome Pipelines to provide advanced access to standard brain analysis tools;
3. Computing approaches based on high performance clusters, MapReduce and Hadoop as well as canonical architectures will be deployed and connected to data and analytics. Deliverable: We will implement fast high-throughput brain mapping analysis pipelines by exploiting the most advanced software and hardware architectures for big-data harnessing. The combined contribution of scientific expertise and technologies will allow bringing “online” and harnessing the long tail of neuroscience data currently available but limitedly accessible to a majority of investigators within the Midwest.

The core goal of the ACNN Spoke is to build a sustainable ecosystem of neuroscience community partners in both academia and industry using existing technologies for collaboration and virtual meeting together with face-to-face group meetings. Use of Web-based conferencing systems and remote communication technologies with regular monthly meetings will allow us to achieve our project objectives without incurring additional travel and related expenses for logistics.

The figure illustrates the details of the different technological and application components of the ACNN Spoke with participation of the different partners. In order to accomplish these three areas of integration, we will establish neuroscience-specific community-driven standards using scientific workflows systems, ontology and meta data standards. The creation and implementation of these standards will involve a great deal of community building over a number of years.

The ACNN publications illustrate the breadth and depth of neuroscience research conducted at member institutions.

Contact

To contact the ACNN investigators, please email:

info@neurosciencenetwork.org

We will attempt to respond to all inquiries within a reasonable timeframe.

Donate

You can make a gift to support ACNN research, education, training, and development activities by donating to any of the 4 primary institutions.

• University of Michigan Giving
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• Indiana University Giving
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• Case Western Reserve University Giving
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• Ohio State University Giving
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• Beckman Institute Giving

Credits

The research, development, education activities, and scholarship of the Advanced Computational Neuroscience Network (ACNN) is made possible by:

The National Science Foundation (NSF)

NSF grants 1636840, 1636846, 1636893, 1636850, and 1550320 provide partial ACNN support

Participating organizations

• University of Michigan: Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS) and Statistics Online Computational Resource (SOCR)
• Indiana University: Indiana Computational Neuroimaging Research and IUNI
• Ohio State University: OSU Network Based Computing
• Case Western Reserve University: CWRU Biomedical and Healthcare Informatics
• Washington University: Neuroimaging Informatics and Analysis Center
• Northwestern University: Neuroimaging and Applied Computational Anatomy
• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology

Principal investigators

A team of transdisciplinary investigators from the Advanced Computational Neuroscience Network (ACNN), including:

• University of Michigan: Ivo Dinov, Rich Gonzales, John Marcotte
• Indiana University: Franco Pestilli, Olaf Sporns, Andrew Saykin
• OSU: Dhabaleswar Panda, Khaled Hamidouche, Xiaoyi Lu, Hari Subramoni
• CWRU: Satya Sahoo
• Washington University: Daniel Marcus, and Northwestern University: Lei Wang

Web-development

• IUNI: Ben Serrette, Christian Briggs, Valentin Pentchev, Franco Pestilli
• MIDAS and SOCR: Alex Kalinin, Syed Husain, Kinnothan Nelson, Ivo Dinov

Affiliates

• Eleftherios Garyfallidis
• Sanmi Koyejo
• Kamyar Moud
• Hassan Jassar
• Monica Michelle Gaudier Diaz
• Josiah Leong
• Joanne Kenney

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