Accelerate Your Neuroscience Research with EBRAINS

EBRAINS tutorials and users day - 12 March 2025 in Heidelberg (Germany)

The EBRAINS tutorials and users day is for two audiences: newcomers to the EBRAINS Research Infrastructure (introductions, overviews, beginner hands-on tutorials) and seasoned EBRAINS users for advanced tutorials and user discussion groups with developers.

• Quick demonstration of a sample set of "EBRAINS science tools in action" in the morning plenary talks (this part of the event can also be attended online free of charge)
• Followed by parallel hands-on tutorials: meeting participants can attend 3 consecutive sessions and choose for each from a set of in parallel tutorials. This part is onsite only for most tutorials.
  
  

Registration

• for attending on-site in Heidelberg (Germany) -- registration fee (coffee breaks, catering lunch and dinner at the meeting site, ...): 40 Euro for student attendants (Bachelor, Master, PhD students) / 80 Euro for everybody else.
  • Non-project members:
    • We strongly recommend to register with an EBRAINS account, as the account gives access to the services presented and an account will be needed to use the EBRAINS RI hands-on
      • get an EBRAINS account HERE (free of charge)
      • then register with EBRAINS account (with registration fee for the meeting)
    • It is also possible to register without an EBRAINS account (use this option primarily, if your email domain is not (yet) on the positive-list for immediate EBRAINS account creation)
  • EBRAINS2.0 project members please register here
    
    
• for attending on-line (via zoom) -- free of charge:
  • register for on-line attendance with EBRAINS account (recommended)
  • or register for on-line attendance without EBRAINS account

Venue

European Institute for Neuromorphic Computing (EINC),
Im Neuenheimer Feld 225a,
D-69120 Heidelberg,
Germany

Airports

• Nearest airport: Frankfurt international airport (FRA)
  • Train Station in the airport itself: Frankfurt Flughafen Fernbahnhof (use bahn.de for time table information)
  • About an hour by car. Info: we often used the TLS shuttle service in the past. A shuttle for up to 7 people costs around 160 Euro single trip. This shuttle needs to be booked in advance.
• also relatively close: Stuttgart airport (STR) Train station in the airport: "Stuttgart Flughafen/Messe". (use bahn.de for time table information)

Train station

Heidelberg Main Station (Heidelberg Hauptbahnhof, use bahn.de for time table information)

From Heidelberg Main station to the institute:

• 25 min walking distance
• or 5 min by tram (Tram number 24, direction: Handschuhsheim Burgstraße. The tram departs from "Steig E" outside the station building. See the plan of Heidelberg Main station.
  Leave the tram at "Bunsengymnasium", then walk 3 min to the institute)

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Option for participants with young children (age 1.5 -6 years)

We can book child care (for children age 1.5 to 6 years) at the universities KidsClub, 7 min walking distance from the meeting location. This option is (only) available until end of January (and only for children with both measles vaccinations completed). Please contact kindler@kip.uni-heidelberg.de for this option.

A high level introduction for researchers into the possibilities, tools and workflows offered by the EBRAINS Research Infrastructure today = for immediate use in own research projects

Briefly showing some of the tools / services / hardware systems or software environment, which are part of the EBRAINS research infrastructure in action -- "teasers" for the tutorials, starting after the coffee break.

The EBRAINS Knowledge Graph:

• Documentation
• Search

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Note: there are also two specific NEST related tutorials offered (see below):

• NESTML tutorial
• NEST astrocyte module tutorial

Tutorial offered: a beginners online hands-on experience on using NEST Desktop for teaching

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Tutorials offered: Introductory level and Advanced level.
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Tutorials offered: Beginners level tutorial and a machine-learning methods related tutorial.

Beginner level tutorial: In this tutorial, participants will get individual remote access to the BrainScaleS-2 platform. They will learn how to program the system, explore its analog properties and create spiking neural networks that learn to solve user-defined tasks. The session will be suitable for building basic knowledge about neuromorphic processors and analog computing as well as for kickstarting complex scientific research on BrainScaleS-2.

Machine learning methods related tutorial: Recent advances in machine learning with neural networks require an increasing energy budget. Neuromorphic hardware platforms, such as the BrainScaleS-2 (BSS-2) system, aim to offer accelerated energy-efficient computing solutions through analog computation. However, scalable training of spiking neural networks (SNNs) on an analog substrate remains challenging. Our jaxsnn software framework (based on JAX) enables data-efficient event-based gradient computation, tailored for optimizing networks on hardware operating on event data. In this hands-on tutorial, participants will first learn how to use jaxsnn on BrainScaleS for implementing “Spiking Heidelberg Digits” (SHD) spoken digit classification with a spiking neuronal network on the BSS-2 system.

We also offer full-length tutorials for these tools -- EBRAINS has more tools than short introduction talks fit into the morning...

Interactively build and optimize your own data-driven, biophysically detailed neuron model, via EBRAINS services and HPC facilities.

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URL - (more details will be added to the agenda)

NESTML is a domain-specific language for neuron and synapse models.

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This tutorial features a session on a hyper-parameter optimization framework, called L2L1, implementing the concept of learning to learn.
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(This tutorial might be of interest also for science school teachers in grade 8 and above to determine, whether some 'real research tools' could also be used in their teaching setting) EBRAINS tools for teaching brochure and overview poster

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Tool tutorial registrations will be collected in the registration step. We will then distribute the hands-on tutorials to the 3 parallel slots to maximize the possibility for attendants to visit their preferred tool tutorials.