6th BigBrain Workshop - From microstructure to functional connectomics
Brain exchange across the pond: Croatia meeting deepens ties between EU and Canadian neuroscience
After two years of virtual BigBrain Workshops this year the BigBrain community met again in person at the beautiful coast of Croatia to present their work and to discuss future prospects of the BigBrain data and tools. This year the BigBrain Workshop was held for the first time in conjunction with the Human Brain Project (HBP) Young Researchers Event, taking place the day before the BigBrain Workshop. More than 100 participants learned about topics like big data analytics, human brain atlasing, and computational neuroscience in interactive plenaries and hands-on workshops by Canadian and European researchers. Many of the HBP participants stayed for the following two days of the HIBALL meeting, with a programme offering two keynote talks, a panel discussion, contributed talks, and a poster session.
The Sievers Lecture in Computational Neuroscience was given by MuMing Poo (Institute of Neuroscience, Chinese Academy of Sciences), leader of the recently started China Brain Initiative. His talk focused on the “Transcriptome, Connectome and Neuromodulation of the Primate Brain”. Ivica Kostović (Croatian Institute for Brain Research) gave the HIBALL Lecture in Brain Analytics and Learning. He provided a view “From transient cellular compartments to brain's network architecture.” Both researchers also participated in the panel discussion “Future trends in microstructural connectivity”, together with Katrin Amunts and Alan Evans, Boris Bernhardt and Amir Shmuel (both from The Neuro, McGill University) and Hanchuan Peng (Allen Institute for Brain Science).
The meeting also included topical sessions on Multimodal Data and Atlasing, Image Processing and 3D reconstruction, the state of neuroscience Croatia, and Brain inspired AI and Data Management. In a poster session, 20 researchers and trainees presented their project advances.
The hybrid event brought together leaders and early career researchers of the HBP, Canada's Healthy Brains, Healthy Lives (HBHL) initiative and McGill University, with many taking part onsite, and even more via streaming. The meeting was rounded off by an excursion to the Krka national park.
We thank all organisers, speakers and participants for an inspiring experience!
In particular we thank jagma agencija for their excellent service in setting up the whole event on site.
