Connectionists: ECML Workshop - “Neural Connectomics: From Imaging to Connectivity”

[Demian Battaglia]

ECML Workshop  -   “Neural Connectomics: From Imaging to Connectivity”
September 15, 2014 - Nancy, France

Paper submission deadline: June 20, 2014

Description: 

Systematic extraction of connectivity information is gaining growing importance for the understanding of the general functioning of the brain and its learning capabilities, as well as for designing biomarkers for diagnosis, prediction and prevention in neuropathologies. At the neural level, recovering the exact wiring of the brain (connectome) including nearly 100 billion neurons, having on average 7000 synaptic connections to other neurons, is a daunting task. 
The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers in machine learning and neuroscience to discuss progress and remaining challenges in this exciting and rapidly evolving field. We aim to attract machine learning and computer vision specialists interested in learning about a new problem, as well as computational neuroscientists who may be interested in modeling connectivity data. We will discuss also the results of the First ChaLearn Neural Connectomics Challenge, who attracted over 100 participants, many of them advancing considerably the state-of-the-art.

Topics of interest to the workshop include, but are not limited to: 

•	building connectomes from EM data
•	building connectomes from fMRI data
•	building connectomes from neurophysiology data
•	bridging neuroanatomy and neurophysiology
•	connectomics and learning
•	neuroimaging technology advances
•	network reconstruction algorithms
•	causality in time series
•	feature selection vs. causal discovery
•	generative vs. discriminative modeling
•	sharing data
•	sharing code
•	organizing new challenges
•	establishing ground truth, benchmarking
•	quantitative metrics of evaluation
•	theoretical understanding

Important dates:
o	Paper submission:                       	June 20, 2014
o	Notification of acceptance:          	July 05, 2014 
o	Camera-ready:                             	July 25, 2014 
o	ECML  Workshop:   	   	September 15, 2014 


Important - Submission Guidelines:

We encourage contributions in any of these areas. We welcome 2-page short-form submissions and 6-page long-form submissions. Submissions should be formatted using JMLR Workshop and Proceedings format, style files for which are available at: http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/jmlr.html. We also encourage submissions of previously-published material that is closely related to the workshop topic (for presentation only).

Everybody can attend the workshop even if he does not participate in the challenge (http://connectomics.chalearn.org/). Challenge participants are encouraged to contribute a paper on their results and also submit papers for presentation on the topics of the workshop.

The papers have to be submitted via Easy Chair: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ncw2014