Dates and Location
- Dates: July 24-29, 2023
- User Days: July 24-26, 2023
- Developer Days: July 27-29, 2023
- Location: HHMI Janelia Research Campus, 19700 Helix Dr, Ashburn, VA 20147, Openstreetmap Directions
- Meeting Rooms: For the meeting we have two rooms. The main room is Axon-Dendrite and the breakout room is Spectrum.
Agenda
Logistics
Housing: Housing will be provided onsite on the Janelia research campus.
Travel: Travel support is not provided. Limited funds may be available to support attendee travel. Once attendance has been confirmed, we will contact you to collect additional information regarding your travel details.
- User Days: Attendees should plan to arrive Sunday afternoon and depart on Wednesday evening after the social or Thursday (depending on availability of flights).
- Developer Days: Attendees should plan to arrive Wednesday evening to attend the joint social with User Days participants and depart Saturday afternoon after conclusion of the meeting.
Directions: The Janelia Research Campus is located in Loudoun County, Virginia – just 30 miles from Washington, DC, and about eight miles north of Dulles International Airport (IAD). For directions see https://www.janelia.org/directions
Organizing Committee
Site chair: Jakob Voigt
Program chair (User Days): Oliver Rübel and Ben Dichter
Program chair (Developer Days): Oliver Rübel and Ryan Ly
Administrative Support: Janine Stevens
Additional Organizational Support
- The Kavli Foundation
- Janelia HHMI
What to Bring
- Bring any example data sets needed for your project with you to the hackathon. For any lab-specific data (i.e., data not in NWB), you should know how to read the data using Python or MATLAB and ideally have scripts ready for reading the data.
- Bring your laptop with appropriate software installed. For installation instructions see:
- PyNWB (Python). If you are a developer and want to contribute to PyNWB see the Installing PyNWB for Developers instructions.
- MatNWB (Matlab)
- For an overview of NWB software, see also:
- For an overview of NWB see the NWB Overview Docs
Objective
The Neurodata Without Borders project is an effort to standardize the description and storage of neurophysiology data and metadata. NWB enables data sharing and reuse and reduces the energy barrier to applying data analytics both within and across labs. NWB has seen wide adoption in the neurophysiology community, and there are now over 100 datasets on the DANDI Archive in NWB, including data from the Allen Institute and the International Brain Laboratory.
The User Days will train users how to convert their data to NWB and publish it on the DANDI Archive. We will work with members of the neuroscience community that want to apply NWB to their datasets. We will train attendees, starting from the basics and proceeding to advanced data engineering techniques to maximally utilize the features of the HDF5 and Zarr backends. Attendees will also be trained in the creation of NWB extensions.
The Developer Days will bring neuroscientists, tool builders, and research software engineers together to further the development of the NWB software ecosystem, including the data standard, core software packages, official tools, and community tools. Members of the community will exchange ideas and best practices for using NWB and the libraries, share NWB based tools, surface common needs, solve bugs, make feature requests, brainstorm about future funding and collaboration, and make progress on current blockages.
Note: This event is meant to foster community and collaboration around NWB, not competition. As such, this is really more of a “workshop” or “tutorial” than a “hackathon.” There will be no judges nor prizes. Participants will be expected to bring data from their own lab, bring their own tool, or other relevant project and/or collaborate with others to build integration with NWB.
Projects
To ease collaborative editing of projects we are managing projects in the following Google Docs:
Code of Conduct
Please see the Code of Conduct for all NWB events.