NeuroConferences in Twos

Welcome to April and the era of the virtual conference! Aside from enforcing social distancing, virtual conferences have a number of other social benefits. I have recently presented at two virtual conferences, one on Twitter and one via teleconference software. The Twitter conference (OHBMx) was held previously as the brain.tc conference. This year, I presented on behalf of four co-authors about our new paper "Braitenberg Vehicles as Developmental Neurosimulation".

Our talk (#44) at OHBMx (click to enlarge).

In this talk and paper, we explore using Braitenberg Vehicles (BVs) to study the role of processes related to brain development and ontogenetic emergence of behavior. So-called dBVs are flexible systems that allow for naturalistic explorations of embodied behavior. Our approach utilizes four allied topical areas: evolutionary simulations, multisensory Hebbian learning, simulations of collective behavior, and explorations of embodied cognition.

A little more than a week later, me and one of my co-authors from the Twitter conference (Jesse Parent) presented at the Neuromatch conference. Neuromatch was put together in a only a few weeks by Konrad Kording, Dan Goodman, and Titipat Achakulvisut (congrats to them). The organizers used Crowdcast and Zoom as the presentation media. Two days of talks and over 2500 attendees! While there were various technical challenges to overcome (such as Zoombombing), the conference was a great success. The organizers said that this conference was meant as a template for future all-virtual conferences.

The title of my presentation was "Process as Connectivity: towards biology-specific complex networks". This is an update on presentations given at the Find Your Inner Modeler II workshop and the NetSci 2017 conference. Jesse's presentation was "Embodied Cognition: Using Developmental Braitenberg Vehicles To Model Levels of Representation", and while delayed due to technical difficulties, was a follow-up on our dBVs paper.

Two great talks at Neuromatch! Click to enlarge.

The other part of Neuromatch is matching researchers based on interest area. One interesting outcome to result from this matching process is the new BrainWeb community. BrainWeb is a new collaborative platform aimed at bringing together Neuroscientists and Neuro-adjacent people with expertise to share. They have even visualized an adjacency matrix of the community so far based on expertise. Check out their website for information on hackathon times and virtual locations (URLs).

Now it is I who is caught up in the hairball! Click to enlarge.

UPDATE (4/6): a new paper from several eLife Ambassadors is now out on the bioRxiv with recommendations on how to improve the academic conference experience. Many of their concerns and recommendations for change dovetail with the virtual conference experience. 

Citation: Sarabipour et.al (2020). Evaluating features of scientific conferences: A call for improvements. biorxiv, doi:10.1101/2020.04.02.022079.