I am back in Vienna to join Claus Lamm’s SCAN-Unit at the University of Vienna. As a senior scientist, I will be responsible for our MRI scanner, help to improve our computing infrastructure, development and application of new methods (e.g., real-time fMRI and brain connectivity methods) – and, most importantly: science!
I am actively contributing to a project by Yury Koush (MRRC, Yale University) together with John Ashburner and Peter Zeidman (Functional Imaging Laboratory, University College London), Frank Scharnowski (University of Zurich), Dimitri Van De Ville (EPFL Geneva), Evgeny Prilepin, Sergei Bibikov and Artem Nikonorov (Samara State Aerospace University).
OpenNFT is an open-source framework for neurofeedback training based on real-time fMRI.
Check out our project website for additional details and to download the software: http://opennft.org
I am happy (and extremely proud) that Prof. Ipke Wachsmuth (left, Professor (emerit.) for Artificial Intelligence, Bielefeld University), me (and Lea, who attended IK for the second time), and Dr. Katharina Krämer (right, Psychologist, University of Cologne) will be given the opportunity to chair the next Interdisciplinary College.
Our Focus theme will be: Me, my Self and I. Who am I? Where is my self? What is it like to be ‘me’? We now have started working on an interdisciplinary course program that covers different aspects of self models, self perception, and selfhood.
We all love SPM. However, creating really nice figures for your talk or publication typically involves quite a lot of manual labor and post processing. And then, just when you are done and send the figures to your co-authors, you are informed that you need to exclude one subject from group analysis because their drug screening was positive (or negative – depending on the study).
Things like this happen and this was my motivation to create sweetView a simple and powerful viewer for MRI images and SPM results that allows you to quickly create triplanar or mosaic overlays of your SPM results. The core features include fast selection of images, easily customizable overlays for masks or SPMs, adding (anatomical) labels and saving the slice selection and multiple cursor positions, so you can easily reproduce your original figure design.
The software has been designed for people who use Matlab and SPM12.
Releases:
Development roadmap:
Material:
Together with Amelie Haugg, Franz Liem, Jessica Oschwald, Frank Scharnowski, and Vivian Steiger, I will co-organize the first Brainhack in Zurich.
Brainhack workshops offer an open platform for brain-imaging scientists of all levels of experience to meet and discuss new ideas. In the beginning of March, over forty sites across the globe will simultaneously hold Brainhack events (http://www.brainhack.org)
The Zurich Brainhack will focus on introductory hands-on tutorials on tools for (neuroimaging) data analysis to promote reproducible science. The event also aims to connect the Swiss neuroscience community by providing a space for open discussion.
The admission is free but registration until February 24th is required. More information on http://dynage.github.io/brainhack-zh/
My new interview for a Slovenian CogSci platform is online:
The last conversation this year in the Scientific Cognition series features Dr. Toni Pustovrh, assistant professor and researcher at the Faculty of Social Sciences (FSS) at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and Dr. Ronald Sladky, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.
Dr. Toni Pustovrh is an assistant professor at the Chair for Cultural Studies and a researcher at the Centre for Social Studies of Science at FSS in Ljubljana. He focuses on ethical, legal and social implications of new emerging technologies, human enhancement, bioethics and neuroethics. He also works as a translator of scientific articles and books on science and technology.
Dr. Ronald Sladky is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department for Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics at the University Hospital of Psychiatry at the University of Zurich. For his doctoral thesis in medical physics at the Medical University of Vienna, he investigated the methodology of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and brain connectivity. He is now focusing on how neurofeedback in fMRI studies may benefit psychiatric patients.
Here is the link to the interview transcript and the YouTube video:
Dr. Toni Pustovrh & Dr. Ronald Sladky: From Star Trek to human enhancement
I created this tool a couple of years ago to automatically create larger model spaces based on a single template file. Sometimes there is uncertainty about the presence or absence of a connection in your model. In DCM you account for that by manually creating two models where this connections is either turned on or off and compare there respective model evidences. It is easy to see that this manual approach is tedious for larger model spaces, when there is uncertainty about many connections.
sweetDCMvariate Create DCM models within a given model space based on a given template file. Template files should be created with the official SPM functions or compatible implementation. This tool will then create all variations of connectivity priors as defined in the template model.
Download file: sweetDCMvariate.m
Need some help? Found a bug? Please contact me.
As a member of the Executive Board, I would like to spread the word about the Interdisciplinary College in March 2017:
The Interdisciplinary College (IK) is an annual, intense one-week spring school which offers a dense state-of-the-art course program in neurobiology, neural computation, cognitive science/psychology, artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics and philosophy. It is aimed at students, postgraduates and researchers from academia and industry. The focus topic of the IK 2017 directs the attention to creativity and intelligence as prototypically human characteristics and capacities, investigating their role and importance for the individual but also for society as a whole.
Chairs
Over the last years creativity has become the focus of numerous research projects and entire disciplines, ranging from investigations into the neural foundations of human creativity to Computational Creativity as attempted “computerization” of creative processes (or parts thereof). Creativity is usually conceptualized as sharing a close connection with intelligence, for instance in that the latter often is taken as a precondition of creativity. But creativity also is a necessarily social phenomenon: While creativity
often starts out on an individual basis, and creative acts are ultimately implemented by individuals, society very often enables creativity to happen either in making creative individuals collaborate, or in emergently giving rise to a genuinely collective creative process.
Language serves as connecting thread between the topics creativity, intelligence, the individual, and society. Creativity and intelligence often manifest in language, and individuals and society rely on (different forms of) language as indispensable medium of communication.
Correspondingly, the IK 2017 will consider the mentioned topics from different theoretical as well as applied perspectives, offering courses clustered into four interwoven blocks:
My new home: the famous Burghölzli in Zurich. Founded in the 19th century and with famous residents such as Jung, Bleuler, and Rorschach, the Psychiatric Hospital of the University of Zürich is now a modern facility in a very scenic environment. More than this, it is also a great place to do progressive research. I am working now as a PostDoc in Frank Scharnowski‘s newly founded research group. Our main focus will be real-time fMRI neurofeedback and supporting our partners from the clinical research groups with methodological expertise, such as optimized data pre-processing strategies, resting state functional connectivity, and DCM. I already had time to meet my lovely colleagues and to set up my espresso machine. Oh, and did I mention the scenic environment?
Yesterday, just in time before we are moving to Zurich, I received my habilitation at the Medical University of Vienna in Medical Physics. The toughest part was probably to blitz through 6 years of research in a ten-minute presentation. I hope I did mention all collaborators and funding sources… Anyway, I was so happy that my family, friends, and colleagues were all there to support me. After the party I truly enjoyed my rehabilitation holiday in Spain, together with Katja and Lea.