Search Results: "Michael Hanke"

10 July 2011

NeuroDebian: NeuroDebian@HBM2011.ca

NeuroDebian@HBM2011.ca On June 26-30 the annual meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (HBM2011) took place in Quebec City, Canada. Encouraged by our positive experience at last year s SfN in San Diego and enthusiasm of our scientific adviser, James V. Haxby, we hosted another NeuroDebian booth. The setup was pretty much the same as last year: Some chairs and tables, lots of people, our tri-fold flyers, a Debian mirror and some virtual machine images to show Debian in action. This time we also had an LCD display attracting visitors with the package swarm, some demos, and our recent paper. We had many curious people have their first exposure to Debian, long-time users expressing their gratitude to Debian, and our upstream developers getting together to discuss various topics. Having registered the booth as NeuroDebian , we had the additional pleasure of explaining visitors the concept of a project inside Debian, in contrast to a derived distribution. But that is nothing new really, so let s talk about the differences from last year s booth. First of all, we had more people at the booth. Dominique Belhachemi volunteered to help us out and that was very much appreciated. Although HBM has only about a tenth of the attendees that SfN has, we had significantly more traffic. While last year people were primarily interested in knowing about the project, this time many of them wanted to give it a try immediately. People came with their laptops, got the VM images and started playing with Debian. After a day or so, some came back and asked for recommendations on particular software after having been exposed to the wealth of the Debian archive. What also had increased was the number of developers, or rather research labs developing neuroimaging software that came to the booth to discuss how to get their software into Debian and how to arrange ongoing maintenance of these future Debian packages. As we have our plates already quite full, we have been spending some time on mentoring interested developers to learn the art of Debian packaging and making them familiar with Debian s procedures and standards (e.g. working on #609820 with Yannick Schwartz, upstream, at the booth). ../../_images/BusyBooth216.jpg Two promising new developments need to be mentioned. First, we were approached by companies that develop hardware for brain-imaging and psychophysics research. They were curious to learn about Debian as an integrated platform that offers free software solutions that an increasing amount of their customers demands (e.g. PsychoPy). Apparently, the movement towards open research software has finally made it into the business plans of companies, as they seem to start perceiving compatibility with free software systems as a competitive advantage. We explained how software gets into Debian, and how its release cycle is managed. To foster their motivation we also pointed them to the existing open-source software that is already available or even present in Debian. Let s see whether we see more Debian-certified research products in the future. Lastly, we started talking with folks from the INCF to explore possibilities of collaborating on INCF projects using Debian as the integration and development platform. The INCF is an OECD-funded organization that develops collaborative neuroinformatics infrastructure and promotes the sharing of data and computing resources to the international research community. At least one INCF project is already relying on the efforts of the NeuroDebian project. We are going to continue this discussion during a workshop in September. A report will follow...
../../_images/DDs13.jpg

Debian people at the booth (f.l.t.r): Michael Hanke, Yaroslav Halchenko, Stephan Gerhard, Dominique Belhachemi. Not shown: Swaroop Guntupalli.

Acknowledgments This booth has been made possible by the generous support of Prof. James V. Haxby (Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA).

31 December 2010

Debian News: New Debian Developers (December 2010)

The following developers got their Debian accounts in the last month: Congratulations!

The following developers have returned as Debian Developers after having retired at some time in the past:

Welcome back!

7 October 2010

Debian News: Neuroimaging research in Debian

Debian 6.0 squeeze will be the first GNU/Linux distribution release ever to offer comprehensive support for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) based neuroimaging research. It comes with up-to-date software for structural image analysis (e.g. ants), diffusion imaging and tractography (e.g. mrtrix), stimulus delivery (e.g. psychopy), MRI sequence development (e.g. odin), as well as a number of versatile data processing and analysis suites (e.g. nipype). Moreover, this release will have built-in support for all major neuroimaging data formats.

Please see the Debian Science and Debian Med task pages for a comprehensive list of included software and the NeuroDebian webpage for further information.

NeuroDebian at the Society for Neuroscience meeting 2010

The NeuroDebian team will run a Debian booth at the Society for Neuroscience meeting (SfN2010) that will take place November 13-17 in San Diego, USA. The annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience is one of the largest neuroscience conferences in the world, with over 30,000 attendees. Researchers, clinicians, and leading experts discuss the latest findings about the brain, nervous system, and related disorders.

If you are a Debian enthusiast (developer, contributor, evangelist) and reside near San Diego (or have time and funds for travel/lounge), or already planing to attend SfN 2010, please help us to make the Debian booth at SfN shine. Please contact the NeuroDebian team at team@neuro.debian.net

If you are going to SfN2010, come talk to us at booth #3815.

Michael Hanke and Yaroslav Halchenko

4 August 2010

Michael Banck: 4 Aug 2010

Science and Math Track at DebConf10 This year's DebConf10 (which is great, by the way) at Columbia University, New York will feature Tracks for the first time. We had a Community Outreach track on Debian Day (to be continued by more awesome talks over the rest of the week), a Java track on Monday and an Enterprise track yesterday. Tomorrow, Thursday afternoon, the S cience and Math track (which I am organizing) will take place in the Interschool lab on level 7 of Schapiro Center. The Track will start at 14:00 with a short welcome from me, followed by presentations of debian-science by Sylvestre Ledru and debian-math by David Bremner. At 15:00, Michael Hanke and Yaroslav Halchenko will present their talk on "Debian as the ultimate platform for neuroimaging research". This will be followed at 16:00 by three mini-talks on "New developments in Science Packaging". Adam C. Powell, IV will talk about MPI, Sylvestre Ledru will present linear algebra implementations in Debian and finally Michael Hanke and Yaroslav Halchenko will discuss the citation/reference infrastructure. At the end of track, the annual debian-science round-table will happen at 17:00, where David Bremner (mathematics), Michael Hanke (neuro-debian), Sylvestre Ledru (debian- science/pkg-scicomp), Adam C. Powell, IV (debian- science/pkg-scicomp) and myself (debichem) will discuss matters about cross-field debian-science and math related topics. If afterwards there are still outstanding matters to be discussed, we can schedule ad-hoc sessions for science or math matters on Friday or Saturday. See you at the science track tomorrow!