Dr. Franco Pestilli from the Department of Psychology at UT Austin will give an in-person talk on Friday, March 3rd at 4pm in Oak Hall 408. If you are interested in attending the talk or meeting with Dr. Pestilli, please register here. Dr. Pestilli will discuss the development of a user-friendly cloud informatics platform that allows a user to “Analyze your data on brainlife.io by either uploading or importing it from public archives. Over 400+ pre-processing Apps are available to build your custom workflows. Thousands of jobs can be submitted using shared clusters or on your own computer. Perform group-level statistical analysis or apply machine learning methods using Jupyter notebooks . Publish your full workflow from raw data to published figures in an integrated bundle with a single DOI”.
While the platform is geared towards neuroimaging research, it addresses domain general issues that may be of interest to you, e.g. facilitating and diversifying access to computing resources, enabling reproducible analyses, and harnessing distributed computing power to handle increasingly large datasets.
Dr. Pestilli also conducts research on computational cognitive neuroscience, diffusion imaging, and vision.
There are still opportunities to meet with Dr. Pestilli or join dinner; please register here and share widely.
Abstract:
A public cloud platform to support neuroimaging research in the era of big data
Over the past years, the neuroimaging field has benefited tremendously from an influx in large-scale data collection and sharing efforts that have made it easier to study humans at the scale of populations. Advances in large-scale data-driven methods also address the major scientific need for rigor and reproducibility. However, the use of large datasets poses multiple new challenges for researchers. Traditionally, neuroimaging researchers have collected a few hours of neuroimaging data on a few dozens of subjects and analyzed it using laboratory computers and in-house data processing methods. Modern studies, by contrast, require the analysis of hundreds (if not thousands) of hours of data, with an accompanying move of data away from individual laboratory computers toward high-performance computing clusters and cloud systems. To help ensure the reproducibility and rigor of scientific results, the neuroimaging community has developed public archives for data deposition, data standards, and software libraries for data preprocessing and analysis. I will present a public resource, brainlife.io, which provides integrative web services to help piece together data, software, and hardware in support of simplicity, efficiency, transparency, and equity in big data neuroscience research. The vision of brainlife.io is to become a global interoperable and integrative platform connecting the multiple communities of software developers, hardware providers, and domain scientists via cloud services and technology to support the next generation of breakthroughs in neuroscience.
Co-sponsored by the Department of Neuroscience and the Cognitive Science Program.
Bio:
Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas, Austin. Dr. Pestilli joined the University of Texas in 2020. Prior to that, he was Associate Professor at Indiana University. Dr. Pestilli holds a Ph.D. from New York University and a B.A. from the University of Rome La Sapienza and received Postdoctoral Training at Stanford University and Columbia University.
Dr. Pestilli is the author of over 60 publications spanning multiple fields of science, such as Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience, Vision, Neuroanatomy, Computer Science, and Neuroinformatics. Dr. Pestilli's scientific projects have been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Health, the Department of Defense, the Association for Psychological Science, the Indiana University Emergent Areas of Research, Pervasive Technology Institute, and Microsoft Research.
Dr. Pestilli is elected Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and Psychonomics Society and has received a Microsoft Faculty Fellowship, the Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Achievements by the Association for Psychological Science as well as the Early Career Travel Award from the Japanese Neuroscience Society. He is an editorial board member for Scientific Data, and Scientific Reports. Dr. Pestilli is director of the Advanced Computational Neuroscience Network and founder and director of the open science platform brainlife.io.
For more information, contact: Roeland Hancock at birc@uconn.edu