UPDATE: the webcast is now archived here for posterity.
This is kind of late notice and probably of interest to few people, but I’m giving the NIF webinar tomorrow (or today, depending on your time zone–either way, we’re talking about November 1st). I’ll be talking about Neurosynth, and focusing in particular on the methods and data, since that’s what NIF (which stands for Neuroscience Information Framework) is all about. Assuming all goes well, the webinar should start at 11 am PST. But since I haven’t done a webcast of any kind before, and have a surprising knack for breaking audiovisual equipment at a distance, all may not go well. Which I suppose could make for a more interesting presentation. In any case, here’s the abstract:
The explosive growth of the human neuroimaging literature has led to major advances in understanding of human brain function, but has also made aggregation and synthesis of neuroimaging findings increasingly difficult. In this webinar, I will describe a highly automated brain mapping framework called NeuroSynth that uses text mining, meta-analysis and machine learning techniques to generate a large database of mappings between neural and cognitive states. The NeuroSynth framework can be used to automatically conduct large-scale, high-quality neuroimaging meta-analyses, address long-standing inferential problems in the neuroimaging literature (e.g., how to infer cognitive states from distributed activity patterns), and support accurate “˜decoding’ of broad cognitive states from brain activity in both entire studies and individual human subjects. This webinar will focus on (a) the methods used to extract the data, (b) the structure of the resulting (publicly available) datasets, and (c) some major limitations of the current implementation. If time allows, I’ll also provide a walk-through of the associated web interface (http://neurosynth.org) and will provide concrete examples of some potential applications of the framework.
There’s some more info (including details about how to connect, which might be important) here. And now I’m off to prepare my slides. And script some evasive and totally non-committal answers to deploy in case of difficult questions from the peanut gallery respected audience.