Activities
From NEST
Contents |
[edit]
2012
- July 30-August 24, 2012
- NEST is one of the software packages used for student projects at the Advanced Course in Computational Neuroscience 2012 in Będlewo, Poland. NEST expert Birgit Kriener participates as a tutor.
- June 11-29, 2012
- Markus Diesmann lectures at the Okinawa Computational Neuroscience Course 2012. NEST is one of the software packages used for student projects.
- February, 2012
- The paper by Lindén et al. (2011) has been commented on in Nature Reviews Neuroscience.
- January 17, 2012
- An article in systembiologie.de describes the new institute INM-6 at Juelich Research Center (in German).
- January 15- February 10, 2012
- NEST is one of the software packages used for student projects at the 4th Latin American School on Computational Neuroscience (LASCON IV) at the University of Sao Paulo, Ribeirao Preto, Brazil. Tom Tetzlaff participates as a lecturer and NEST tutor.
[edit]
2011
- December 12, 2011
- Lindén et al. publish a manuscript on the spatial reach of the local-field potential (LFP) in the journal Neuron. In this study, NEST simulations of a cortical network model contribute realistic layer-specific synaptic input to the LFP model. Press releases (English, German) are featured by the Jülich Aachen Research Alliance (JARA) and the Research Center Jülich.
- November 24-25, 2011
- Jochen Martin Eppler from the NEST Initiative, Mikael Djurfeldt, creator of MUSIC and CSA, and Andrew Davison, creator of PyNN, meet in Gif sur Yvette for a hackathon to design and implement a native CSA interface for the NEST backend of PyNN and to discuss the future of the MUSIC interface for NEST.
- October 27-28, 2011
- Manchester-Jülich - EU BrainScaleS and IAS Workshop "What can Neuromorphic Computing and HPC learn from each other?" at the Research Center Jülich
- October 4th, 2011
- A publication by Yamauchi, Kim and Shinomoto extends the MAT neuron model by a voltage dependence of the threshold so that the model exhibits the full range of responses to transient currents. The paper shows that the model is "essentially linear" (Morrison et al. 2008) and can efficiently be implemented using technology developed by the NEST Initiative (Morrison et al. 2007, Rotter and Diesmann 1999).
- September 20-21, 2011
- Members of the NEST Initiative co-organize and attend the workshop "Creating, Documenting & Sharing Network Models" in Edinburgh.
- September 19 - 30, 2011
- NEST is the simulator used for practical activities at Simulation of Biological Neural Networks course at Bernstein Center Freiburg taught by NEST expert Prof. Abigail Morrison.
- August 12, 2011
- An independent publication on state of the art integration methods for spiking neuronal networks lists only NEST as a software package achieving the accuracy of the reference solution and points out the importance of handling spikes in continuous time (Henker et al. 2011 J Comput Neurosci doi:10.1007/s10827-011-0353-9). The detailed algorithm implemented in NEST has been published in Hanuschkin, Kunkel et al. 2010 Front Neuroinf 4:113. The latest version of PyNN provides an interface for enabling continuous spike interaction if provided by the simulation engine.
- August 1 - 26, 2011
- NEST is one of the software packages used for the student projects at the 16th Advanced Course in Computational Neuroscience. This year NEST expert Moritz Deger will serve as a tutor.
- July 23 - 28, 2011
- Several projects involving NEST are presented at the CNS 2011 in Stockholm (see [1],[2],[3]).
- June 21, 2011
- NEST goes climate science. Anne Chapuis and Tom Tetzlaff (Norwegian University of Life Sciences) study the dynamics of glacier calving using NEST as a simulation tool. The work is presented by Tom Tetzlaff at the Biannual Meeting of the Norwegian Physical Society 2011. In an interview published by the largest Norwegian online science journal forskning.no, Anne Chapuis and Tom Tetzlaff talk about their project (in Norwegian).
- June 13 - 30, 2011
- NEST is one of the software packages used for the student projects at the Okinawa Computational Neuroscience Course 2011. This year NEST expert Dr. Jan Moren will serve as a tutor.
- June 2011
- Dr. Jochen Martin Eppler automates mass creation of NEST USB-sticks at Forschungszentrum Jülich.
- June 9th, 2011
- The front page of Jülich Aachen Research Alliance (JARA) features the interview with Marcus Diesmann "Von Tokio nach Jülich: Prof. Markus Diesmann simuliert mit mathematischen Modellen Hirnaktivität" ("From Tokyo to Jülich: Prof. Markus Diesmann simulates brain activity with mathematical models," in German).
- May - September, 2011
- NEST is a participating project in this year's Google Summer of Code to deploy Continuous Integration infrastructure improving on the existing development practices (implemented by Yury V. Zaytsev and mentored by Prof. Abigail Morrison).
- Spring Semester 2011
- Large-Scale Neural Modeling class at Stanford University given by Dr. Kwabena Boahen and assisted by Peiran Gao used NEST for modeling exercises.
- March 17th, 2011
- The front page of Frontiers features the invited focused review by Helias et al. on "Finite post synaptic potentials cause a fast neuronal response".
- February 7th, 2011
- An invited focused review article "Finite post synaptic potentials cause a fast neuronal response" by Dr. Moritz Helias and colleagues was accepted for publication in Frontiers in Neuroscience. The article reviews recent progress in the theory of integrate-and-fire models in the presence of finite post synaptic potentials. The mathematical insights are illustrated using the analogy of the shishi odoshi. Section 6.2 discusses the importance of reliable simulation technology.
- January 24, 2011
- NEST enabled research results were presented at a ceremony at the National Art Center Tokyo to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the treaty of friendship between Japan and Prussia organized by the German embassy. The event took place in the presence of the crown prince Naruhito of Japan, the vice foreign minister of Japan Matsumoto, and the German embassador Dr. Stanzel (more at DAAD news). As the result of a competitive selection process the study "What Japanese gardens teach us about neural dynamics" by Dr. Helias and co-workers was presented to the crown prince as one out of only two. A more detailed report on the latter work was just published in Frontiers in Neuroscience.
- January 2011
- An article about visualization of simulation results on JUGENE supercomputer in Jülich: "Visualizing Spiking Neurons in Virtual Reality".
[edit]
2010
- November 14-15, 2010
- NEST 2.0 is demonstrated during the SfN Annual Meeting in San Diego at the booth of the INCF (see below). The demonstration will take place on Nov. 15 from 9:30 to 12:30 in booth #4025 which will be in the Non-profit area of the exhibits. The full program of demos at the INCF booth can be downloaded at [4]. In addition, there is a NEST Poster in the scientific program on Sunday, November 14 from 11:00-12:00 in Halls B-H, 208.28/MMM19 and one at the Computational Neuroscience Social on Tuesday, November 16 from 6:45 pm-8:45 pm.
- November 12, 2010
- A paper about the FACETS Demonstrater has been submitted to Biological Cybernetics. A citable preprint is available at arXiv.org.
- November 11, 2010
- The first release candidate of NEST 2.0 is available including technology described in 4 recently published papers. See the release notes.
- November 3, 2010
- The manuscript "PyNN: a common interface for neuronal network simulators" has made it into the top 25 of most cited Frontiers articles since its original publishing date back in January 2009.
- November 3, 2010
- The manuscript "PyNEST: a convenient interface to the NEST simulator" has made it into the top 25 of most cited Frontiers articles since its original publishing date back in January 2009.
- September 9, 2010
- A manuscript reporting the first neuroscientific discovery with NEST only possible with the technology to simulate spike interactions in continuous time has been published at PLoS Computational Biology. The authors observe a previously overlooked instantaneous non-linear response of the integrate-and-fire neuron. Press-releases are available on the RIKEN BSI and the RIKEN (English and Japanese) as well as on the University Freiburg (English and German), the Bernstein Network Computational Neuroscience and the Bernstein Center Freiburg web site. Some resulting press coverage can be found here.
- September 2 - 4, 2010
- NEST related poster contributions at Neuro2010 in Kobe, Japan
- August 30 - September 1, 2010
- Poster contributions describe the current state of NEST at the INCF congress in Kobe, Japan
- August 2 - 27, 2010
- NEST is one of the software packages used for the student projects at the 15th Advanced Course in Computational Neuroscience
- July 24 - 30, 2010
- At the CNS*2010 conference neuroscientific results obtained with NEST will be presented in one featured oral contribution and one short oral contribution: Chris Trengove, Cees van Leeuwen, Markus Diesmann "High storage capacity of synfire chains in large-scale cortical networks of conductance-based spiking neurons."; Tom Tetzlaff, Moritz Helias, Gaute Einevoll, Markus Diesmann "Decorrelation of low-frequency neural activity by inhibitory feedback."
- June 14 - July 1
- NEST is one of the software packages to be used for the student projects at the Okinawa Computational Neuroscience Course 2010. This year two NEST experts will serve as tutors: Wiebke Potjans (plasticity and neuromodulators) and Tobias Potjans (structured networks).
- April 29, 2010
- The article "The mechanism of synchronization in feed-forward neuronal networks" by Sven Goedeke and Markus Diesmann (2008) New Journal of Physics doi: 10.1088/1367-2630/10/1/015007 has be downloaded over 720 times. The impact factor of this journal is now 3.44.
- April 21, 2010
- The Junior Professorship Programme of Baden-Wuerttemberg supports Prof. Abigail Morrison's research on the neuronal basis of movement control. All simulations are carried out with NEST. press release
[edit]
2009
- November 16, 2009
- NEST release 1.9.8401-2 contains an implementation of the award winning MAT2 neuron model by Kobayashi R, Tsubo Y, and Shinomoto S (2009) Front. Comput. Neurosci. 3:9 doi:10.3389/neuro.10.009.2009. Using this model, Dr. Kobayashi (Ritsumeikan University) won the 1st prizes for Challenges A and B of the INCF Quantitative Single-Neuron Modeling Competition 2009 awarded at the 2nd INCF Congress in Pilsen, Czech Republic.
- November 13, 2009
- A manuscript reporting the first neuroscientific discovery with NEST only possible with the technology to simulate spike interactions in continuous time has been uploaded to ArXiv. The authors observe a previously overlooked instantaneous non-linear response of the integrate-and-fire neuron.
- October 7-9, 2009
- FACETS CodeJam Workshop #3
- organized by Abigail Morrison and Bernd Wiebelt with Eilif Muller and Andrew Davison
- September 6 - 8, 2009
- Dr. Markus Diesmann is an invited speaker at the workshop "High performance computing and grid infrastructure for neuroinformatics applications" at the 2nd INCF Congress of Neuroinformatics
- August 3 - 28, 2009
- NEST is one of the software packages to be used for the student projects at the 14th Advanced Course in Computational Neuroscience
- Tutoring by Moritz Helias
- July 22 - 23, 2009
- Jochen Martin Eppler presents the NEST-Python integration in a workshop on "Python in Neuroscience" at the 18th Annual Computational Neuroscience Meeting CNS*2009
- July 18, 2009
- "Large-Scale Neuronal Network Models: Principles and Practice," a Bernstein-Tutorial at the CNS*2009 meeting by Dr. Hans Ekkehard Plesser
- June 18, 2009
- Dr. Marc-Oliver Gewaltig gives a NEST tutorial at the Okinawa Computational Neuroscience Course 2009
- June 15 - July 2, 2009
- NEST is one of the software packages to be used for the student projects at the Okinawa Computational Neuroscience Course 2009
- Tutoring by Birgit Kriener
- May 25 - 28, 2009
- Dr. Marc-Oliver Gewaltig is an invited speaker at the 3rd Workshop on Detailed Modelling and Simulation of Signal Processing in Neurons
- April 6, 2009
- Dr. Hans Ekkehard Plesser gives an invited talk entitled "Simulating Neuronal Networks: It is easy to do---but do we know what we are doing?" at the University of Oldenburg, Germany
- March 27 - 28, 2009
- NEST related poster contributions to the 8th Göttingen Meeting of the German Neuroscience Society: T25-10A, T26-2B, -5B, -6B, -7B, -13B, -1C, -3C, -4C, -7C
- March 19 - 21, 2009
- Members of the NEST Initiative actively particpate in the INCF activity on Standards and Guidelines for Large-Scale Modeling
- 1st meeting of the task force held in Tokyo, Japan
- March 17, 2009
- Dr. Hans Ekkehard Plesser gives an invited talk on "Simulating Layered Neuronal Networks with PyNEST" at the University of Tsukuba, Japan
[edit]
2008
- November 15 - 19, 2008
- NEST poster and demo at the INCF booth at the 38th annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience
- Some conference contributions using the NEST simulator: 16.1, 326.16/C7, 220.1, 694.1/UU62
- September 7 - 9, 2008
- Live demonstration of NEST at the 1st INCF Congress of Neuroinformatics
- NEST related poster contributions: 14, 46, 83, 87
- August 5, 2008
- NEST tutorial by Dr. Marc-Oliver Gewaltig at the 13th Advanced Course in Computational Neuroscience
- August 4 - 29, 2008
- NEST is one of the software packages to be used for the student projects at the 13th Advanced Course in Computational Neuroscience
- Tutoring by Moritz Helias
- July 19 - 24, 2008
- NEST related poster contributions to the 17th Annual Computational Neuroscience Meeting CNS*2008: P60, P69, P131
- NEST developers, Alexander Hanuschkin and Susanne Kunkel, receive an award for one of the best poster contributions
- June 19, 2009
- "Simulating large neural networks with the Neural Simulation Tool NEST", a lecture by Dr. Marc-Oliver Gewaltig at the Okinawa Computational Neuroscience Course 2008
- June 16 - July 3, 2008
- NEST is one of the software packages to be used for the student projects at the Okinawa Computational Neuroscience Course 2008
- Tutoring by Birgit Kriener and Tom Tetzlaff
[edit]
2007
- December 2007
- NEST Poster at the INCF booth at the Society for Neuroscience Meeting 2007 in San Diego.
- August 2007
- NEST tutorial at the FIAS Neuroschool 2007 NEST is one of the software packages to be used for the student projects.
- August 2007
- NEST tutorial at the EU Advanced Course in Computational Neuroscience in Arcachon, France. NEST is one of the software packages to be used for the student projects.
- July 2007
- NEST initiative participates in the workshop "Availability of published computational models for testing and attributed reuse" at the Computational Neuroscience, CNS*07 conference.
- June 2007
- NEST is used in the FACETS course "Modelling for beginners" in Stockholm.
- June 2007
- NEST technology is discussed in a tutorial on "Differential equations and numerics for large spiking neural networks" at the Okinawa Computational Neuroscience Course, OCNC 2007.
- May 2007
- Paper on 'Spike-Timing-Dependent Plasticity in Balanced Random Networks' using NEST has been published in Neural Computation 2007; 19:1437-1467 A press release can be found here.
- May 2007
- The NEST web-site moves to MediaWiki, the wikipedia platform.
- April 2007
- NEST is discussed in a review on simulators, accepted for publication in JCNS.
- April 2007
- Milestones and bug-tracking moves to trac platform http://trac.edgewall.org/.
- April 2007
- Discussion on meta-simulator at FACETS CodeJam, Heidelberg.
- 02.04.2007 - 05.04.2007
- Python interface for NEST completed at FACETS CodeJam, Heidelberg.
- March 2007
- Scholarpedia article on NEST published.
- February 2007
- Paper on 'Exact Subthreshold Integration with Continuous Spike Times in Discrete-Time Neural Network Simulations' using NEST published. Neural Computation. 2007;19:47-79
- 11.01.2007 - 13.01.2007
- HRI participates in FACETS meeting.
- January 2007
- HRI introduced as an officially partner of FACETS.
[edit]
2006
- December 2006
- Paper on "Programmable Logic Construction Kits for Hyper Real-time Neuronal Modeling" Guerrero-Rivera R, Morrison A, Diesmann M, Pearce, T C (2006) Neural Computation 18 : 2651--2679
- 12.12.2006 - 13.12.2006
- NEST represented at 1st INCF workshop on large-scale modeling; resulting report is consistent with many ideas developed in the course of the research on NEST operations.
- September 2006
- Pre-release of NEST 2 available with distributed computing and STDP capabilities.
- September 2006
- Diesmann reseach group moves to RIKEN BSI [5].
- 07.08.2006 - 01.09.2006
- NEST is one of the software packages that has been used in the advanced course in computational neuroscience in Arcachon, France.
- 31.07.2006 - 11.08.2006
- Introduction to NEST in the course "Simulation of biological neuronal networks" held at the BCCN in Freiburg.
- 16.07.2006 - 18.07.2006
- NEST workshop at CNS Conference in Edinburgh.
- 01.06.2006
- Hathor cluster financed by BCCN fund goes into operation. Photos Hathor
- 25.05.2006
- Article describing technology for simulations with precise spike times accepted for publication by Neural Computation.
- February 2006
- The website of the Black Forest Grid becomes operational.
[edit]
2005
- November 2005
- A SUN V40z, 4 x Dual Core 2.2Ghz Opteron SMP system with 32GB memory arrives at the BCCN in Freiburg. The system's mission is:
- explore the properties of complex cortical graphs
- explore hybrid algorithms for large scale simulations combining message-passing with multi-threading to exploit modern computer architectures
- Here are some photos of the hardware.
- September 2005
- The EU funded FACETS project (Fast Analog Computing with Emergent Transient States) starts. NEST is one of the simulation tools used in this project.
- 01.08.2005 - 26.08.2005
- NEST is one of the simulation tools used at the Computational Neuroscience Summer School in Arcachon, France.
- 17.07.2005 - 21.07.2005
- Extended tutorial on NEST at the CNS*2005 Meeting in Madison, Wi.
- 15.05.2005
- The Freiburg based researchers of the NEST Initiative are among the founding members of the Black Forest Grid (also available in German ).
- 18.01.2005 - 28.01.2005
- Contribution to the Summer School on Advanced Scientific Computing in Alpine Heath Resort, Drakensberg, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.
[edit]
2004
- August/September 2004
- Introduction of the Neuro Simulation Tool NEST at the Computational Neuroscience Summer School in Obidos, Portugal.
- February 2004
- Course Simulation of Biological Neural Networks at the University of Freiburg

