INCF National Node of Finland: Activities and Pilot Projects
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1
Tampere University of Technology, Finland
The INCF National Node of Finland (INCFF) was established in 2007. It is hosted by the Department of Signal Processing at Tampere University of Technology. The activities of INCFF are funded through the Academy of Finland [1], the prime funding agency for basic research in Finland. In addition to the chair and coordinator the node has a nine-member steering group with representatives from the fields of neuroscience and computer science in Finnish universities. Funding for the first two years (2008-09) was used to initiate the INCF activity in Finland. The work included organizing two national workshops on neuroinformatics, promoting national and international networking, and performing a survey of Finnish research groups associated with neuroinformatics studies. Based on the survey Finland has approximately ten larger research groups in neuroimaging, three middle-size computational neuroscience groups, and one research group in neurotechnology. The node was awarded a continuation of funding for 2010-11 with a mission to set up strong networking and collaboration between Finnish neuroscientists and computer scientists. The anticipated activities of the node are focused on education and networking. The activities focused on education in neuroinformatics can be summarized as follows: organization of workshops on national level, providing support for the new pilot projects, organization of Nordic Course on Neuroinformatics, and preparation of the web-based learning material. This learning material will be initially prepared for the Nordic Course, but will be publicly available and regularly updated after the course in order to be used for independent training of researchers. In all of its activities the node is addressing both national and international networking. We will continue visiting and interviewing the Finnish neuroscience and neuroinformatics groups. We will also continue participating INCF activities, including workshops and node meetings. We have also plans to promote collaboration with other INCF nodes in the form of joint pilot tool projects. In 2009, INCFF initiated a small pilot project for testing data storage, sharing, and browsing. XooNIps platform (http://xoonips.sourceforge.jp/; [2]) was selected as a potential candidate. Main goal of the pilot project is to examine the suitability of XooNIps user interface and database for storing and linking PET research related information (publications, measured data, simulated data, phantom data, human data). This kind of information is not only needed by the research laboratories themselves for sharing and browsing information but also by the whole research community to more effectively share research resources. As a result it was concluded that XooNIps platform is able to perform well in basic data uploading and linking tasks. The system will be taken into full use in M2oBSI research group (http://www.cs.tut.fi/sgn/m2obsi/) at Tampere University of Technology in the near future.
References
1. Academy of Finland, project # 137349
2. Yamaji K, Sakai H, Okumura Y, and Usui S (2007) Customizable neuroinformatics database system: XooNIps and its application to the pupil platform. Comput Biol Med 37(7):1036-41.
Conference:
Neuroinformatics 2010 , Kobe, Japan, 30 Aug - 1 Sep, 2010.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Infrastructural and portal services
Citation:
Linne
M and
Ruotsalainen
U
(2010). INCF National Node of Finland: Activities and Pilot Projects.
Front. Neurosci.
Conference Abstract:
Neuroinformatics 2010 .
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnins.2010.13.00109
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Received:
15 Jun 2010;
Published Online:
15 Jun 2010.
*
Correspondence:
Marja-Leena Linne, Tampere University of Technology, Tampere, Finland, marja-leena.linne@tuni.fi