IMPACT
Enhancing the potential and future career prospects of the staff members
The wide-range of
synergies among neuroscientists, data scientists, imaging engineers, and systems developers will enable our
young ERs and ESRs to get trained and do research in a unique multi-disciplinary programme and
become more competitive. Given that the machine-learning and data analysis of neuroscience data is
becoming increasingly important, this training can have a significant impact on the new generation of
neuroscientists. They also be trained and do research with various state-of-the art and advanced tools (e.g.,
2-photon imaging and SLM at Harvard, miniscopes at UCLA, fmrIS at UA). This impact will be further
enhanced by the interaction with the imaging engineers and developers: given the rapid advances in imaging
techniques, the exposure in imaging technologies will deepen the understanding of both communities. On the
other hand, computer scientists, including data scientists, systems people, and neuromorphic engineers, will be
exposed in this exciting field of neuroscience. Through their secondments at Harvard, UCLA, and
IMBB-FORTH, the computer scientists at the ICS-FORTH, ProMetronics, Neurocom, and, UZH, will develop
a deeper understanding of neuroscience and strengthen their computational neuroscience expertise.
For the CS and engineers, the project could become an important showcase for their machine-learning,
statistical analysis, and high performance platforms. For example, proMetronics will be able to improve its
AI engine that targets monitoring complex systems with high non-linear characteristics and the secondments
will widen their expertise to potentially serve various different areas, e.g., a) live monitoring of dynamic
coating- and conditioning processes, b) materials with light emitting properties, c) materials with highly non
predictable structures, d) artificial tissues, e) medical applications to biologic tissues and cell culture. Similarly
for Neurocom, with respect to the use of their high performance platforms for making the scientific analysis
and collaboration world-wide more efficient. This is amazing opportunity for “cross-fertilization” can create
valuable skills for their professional life. Thus neuronsXnets will not only enhance the skills of individual
staff members and enable them to obtain new ones in critical areas. This will enable them to
differentiate themselves from others and significantly improve their career perspectives.
Cultivation of soft skill
Through the work in different organizations/countries during the secondments, their
participation in several networking activities and presentations, they will cultivate soft skills that also
contribute in their professional development.
Creating professional opportunities
The involvement of large organizations in the project and the
emphasis on various types of networking activities and relatively large secondments will maximize the
interaction of each visiting researcher with other researchers at the host organization, creating opportunities
for additional collaborations, extending their professional network, employment opportunities, and
career options. The senior ERs are committed to (i) establish along with the ESRs and young ERs that
supervise (e.g., as part of their team, or during secondments), concrete and thorough Career Development
Plan, at an early stage of the project, (ii) help them to enhance their project management skills, iii) expand
their network by benefitting from their own extensive network.
All team members will have the opportunity to enhance their publication and grant proposal record.
Moreover their will strengthen their organizational and science communication.
Enhancing teaching skills
Most of the team members will be encouraged to participate in giving lectures in
the context of the courses as well as in seminars, exhibitions, and public talks. These activities will further
strengthen the teaching skills. The courses will provide opportunities for different less
traditional/mainstream pedagogical approaches, such as project/problem-oriented with substantial team-work
and interdisciplinary topics. The interaction with highly-motivated students at all levels, through the proposed
research, teaching, and dissemination activities, a fraction of whom will hopefully be attracted to pursue a
career in systems neuroscience, is a significant benefit. As for academic advancement, graduate students
participating in the project will complete their M.Sc./Ph.D. thesis, thoroughly developing novel research topics
lying amidst the breath of the project. We expect that at the end of the project, there will be a substantial critical
mass for these research areas in the academic partners.
Developing New and Lasting Research Collaborations
In the proposed network,
several ERs are tenured/permanent members of the partner institutions. This is essential to ensure that the
initiated collaborations stay with all participating institutions, as researchers without permanent research
positions are expected to eventually move to permanent positions away from the current host institutions, and
thus their participation alone cannot guarantee a lasting, sustainable collaboration. As the research of the
proposed programme matures and delivers the scientific results, the participating permanent members of the
partner institutions are expected to continue to involve their students and postdoctoral collaborators.
The likely exchange of students and postdocs and/or transition of students to postdoctoral positions in the other
partner institutions that is expected to arise in this case will guarantee the continuation of a close collaboration
in the future, even after the expiration of the joint programme.
The proposed collaboration will foster the initiation of a broader effort involving several faculty and
researchers in Europe interested in neural network analysis, creating a ground for fruitful joint
multidisciplinary research in a larger scale. It will form the nidus for a long-term productive joint effort
which will fill an important research and educational need in the domain of systems neuroscience.
Dissemination and educational actions
The project will aim for a number of high-quality of
publications, number of students, postdocs, researchers involved in the proposed research and curriculum
activities, number of thesis produced based on this research, grant proposals submitted to extend this research,
and several dissemination efforts (e.g., talks, public lectures, participation to conferences and science
exhibitions).
Data Policy, Repository, Open Access & Open Source Tools
Data Policy, Repository, Open Access & Open Source Tools The large scale transfer of knowledge within
EU and between the EU and the US will be strengthen by our commitment to make our results, analysis
methods, and software tools publicly available so that researchers world-wide can use them and build on
them. We intend to create and maintain an online data repository, available to the research community,
with a detailed documentation of our models, the open source code that implements the analysis (with a
programmer’s guide for the use of libraries and utilities), and datasets for training and testing these models
(also available at github). A significant part of the collected measurements will be made available with
open source code for preprocessing and data analysis. Researchers can use them for educational purposes,
benchmarking, and testing other hypothesis. The repository will be further enriched with multimedia resources
about analysis of such data for educational purposes. Finally, we will provide tips about performing such data
analysis studies in an efficient manner addressing the computational and memory issues (e.g., when running
the analysis on large datasets). We will try to support continuous improvement of the aforementioned tools to
maximize effectivity through community contribution. By providing worldwide access to
high-performance tools, all members of the project will benefit from extended usage and evaluation.
Publications
An indicative list of reputed journals and conferences where the teams aim to publish its research
results of the project includes Nature, Science, Nature neuroscience, the Journal of Neuroscience, Journal of
Neurophysiology, Neuron. In addition we will disseminate the results in popular science magazines like
scientific American and EOS (Belgium). Scientific results will be presented to international scientific
conferences, both relevant to neuroscience and computer science, such as Society for Neuroscience meeting
held every year in the U.S, the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS) forum of 2022, the European Brain and Behavior Society meeting, the Computational Neuroscience Societies meeting. For the
work with emphasis on neuromorphic computing, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems
(TBioCAS), ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays, and IEEE
International Symposium on, Circuits and Systems (ISCAS) are possible avenues for publication.