Connectionists: announcing neuromatch online unconference, 30-31st March

[Dan Goodman]

Hi everyone,

Conference cancelled due to coronavirus? Don't worry! Next week we are 
running neuromatch: a free, online (computational-ish) neuroscience 
unconference. Register now at:

https://www.neuromatch.io/

March 30-31 will feature invited speakers including:

- Yoshua Bengio (Mila)
- Kate Jeffery (UCL)
- Russ Poldrack (Stanford)
- Maria Geffen (UPenn)
- Tim Behrens (Oxford)
- Nicole Rust (UPenn)
- Danielle Bassett (UPenn)

There will also be contributed talks / virtual posters. Please send your 
title and abstract (< 200 words) to "neuromatchconf at gmail.com" by March 
25th. We welcome student and postdoc contributions in particular. We 
know that many people have severe time constraints these days, so we're 
doing our best to be as flexible as possible about presentation times, 
and you can present any time in your own time zone or others.

The rest of the week, and the week after (Mar 29 - Apr 10) we will be 
running an extended mind matching session to replace the all important 
conference coffee breaks. This is an online version of the mind matching 
sessions run at the last two CCN conferences. You submit a sample of a 
few abstracts that represent the work you're interested in when you 
register, and we automatically match you with 6 other scientists with 
similar interests for 15-20m chats (excluding people you already know). 
For those who haven't tried it, it's amazingly effective. At CCN I met 
two people I'd never met before working on extremely similar projects to me.

Also, we're hoping this format will catch on not only during the 
coronavirus crisis but afterwards as well to help reduce the climate 
impact of academic conferences. Please do get in touch if you'd like to 
adopt the platform for your own conference (everything is or will be 
open sourced).

All the best,

Dan Goodman - http://neural-reckoning.org/
Konrad Kording - http://kordinglab.com/
Brad Wyble - http://wyblelab.com/