Author: Ronald Sladky

First Brainhack Zurich

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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/

New interview: ‘From Star Trek to human enhancement’

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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

 

sweetDCMvariate.m

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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.

Interdisciplinary College 2017 – Creativity and Intelligence in Brains and Machines: From Individuals to Societies

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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

  • Luc Steels (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain)
  • Dieter Jaeger (Emory University, Atlanta, USA)
  • Tarek R. Besold (University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany)

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:

  • Creativity
  • Neuroscience – From Data to Theory and Back
  • Language
  • The Social

http://www.interdisciplinary-college.de

Moving to Zürich

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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?

I’m your Private Docent

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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.

My third OHBM Merit Abstract Award! Off to Hawaii!

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Great news! Martin Tik, Lucia Navarro, and I have each been selected to receive a Merit Abstract Award for the 2015 OHBM Annual Meeting in Honolulu (Hawaii, USA). After a double-blind peer-review process, only the top-rated abstracts were selected for this competitive award. Martin Tik will present his work on ultra-high field functional MR imaging of the human brain during an Aha!-moment as a poster. Lucia Navarro will give an oral presentation on the benefits of her newly-developed MRI acquisition coil in combination with transcranial magnetic stimulation. My effective connectivity study on emotion processing in the extended amygdala network shall be also presented in one of the few oral presentation slots. Aloha!