We want to understand how brains work. New technologies let us measure and manipulate neural activity, at the scale of large populations or entire brains, in behaving animals. However, this in turns yields a new challenge—how to make sense of our data. I will describe an ecosystem of open source technologies for flexible, scalable, and sharable data science. We leverage cloud computing, web technologies, and modern data structures to rapidly process neuroscience data, design new experiments, and collaboratively interpret the results. This effort stands at the intersection of several exciting disciplines and promises to begin to reveal the fundamental operating principles of the brain.
Speaker(s)
Jeremy Freeman
Neuroscientist, Janelia Research Campus
Jeremy Freeman is a neuroscientist at the intersection of biology, computation, data science, and visualization. He wants to understand how the brain supports complex behavior and how it might inform the design of intelligent systems. He’s also passionate about open source and open science, contributing to major open source big data technologies, building platforms for collaborative data sharing and analysis, and advising scientists and developers across a range of fields.