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.

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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.

The NESTML toolchain automatically generates high-performance code for these models, allowing them to be used in simulations of brain activity on several platforms, in particular the NEST Simulator running on HPC, but also the SpiNNaker neuromorphic platform. In this interactive tutorial, we will learn how to create a custom neuron model that exhibits dendritic action potentials, and combine it with a custom synaptic plasticity rule to create a network that learns and replays specific sequences of stimuli.

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.