Project Progress Report

In Attendance

Tom Jackson
Alastair Knowles
Nathan Lepora
Simon Schultz
Jennifer Simonotto
Leslie Smith
Liz Williams

Observing

Dimitrina Spencer

Review of Actions

The minutes of the previous meeting were approved as a true and accurate record.

Work Package Progress Reports

WP0 (Tom Jackson): The period up to this telcon has been uneventful as members of the development team have been on holiday. Mark Jessop has been working on implementing design changes to the portal following the usability review session led by Liz Stuart at the services workshop. Support has been developed for upload of multiple files and directories. Dan Swan has been following up the services workshop with parallel discussions on deployment of services. A case study is being conducted with the WP6 group at Newcastle to elucidate good practice. Discussions are also planned to identify further resource to support this activity. Mike Weeks (York) started work on CARMEN on 1st August 2008 to provide further development capacity. A metadata framework for services has also been developed and is under review within WP0.

WP1 (Leslie Smith): Working on further improvements to existing and novel spike detection algorithms for future provision as services. Shahjahan Shahid happy with the service deployment process and currently testing compilation of algorithms in Matlab to Java. Not sure at this stage whether it will be possible to compile all of the algorithms. Leicester continuing to work on improvements to Wave_clus to allow unsupervised detection of spikes from different neurones.

WP2 (Simon Schultz): Optical imaging experiments working well. Beginning to produce viable data in both ‘red’ and ‘green’ channels. New RA has come into post at Imperial and is lending capacity to this data acquisition. The CARMEN RA, Phillip Bream, has decided to leave the project and has accepted a position at the European Patent Office. Simon currently recruiting to fill the remaining 9 months of the position. Work at Manchester progressing satisfactorily.

WP3 (Nathan Lepora): Now into the 5th month of the workplan. Search algorithms have been characterised and model and search code has been rewritten for robustness, including work to optimise the interaction between Matlab and Genesis. The search method appears to run faster than published alternatives. It works reliably for sub threshold data, e.g. signals not containing significant events such as spikes. Work is taking place to generalise to spiking data. The search algorithm is also being extended to develop capacity to estimate the value of multiple parameters.

WP4 (Bojian Liang): Data translation drivers from NeuroShare now implemented within the CARMEN data translation framework. Release planned with the SDE in 2/3 weeks. Help/support also being developed for SDE to enhance the user experience. A new version of the CARMEN data specification will be published shortly, following review from AK and Martyn Fletcher. AK relayed comments from Chris Adams on confusion over the intended purpose of the SDE. Tom Jackson to visit to discuss further with Chris and colleagues at Newcastle. WP5 (Liz Williams): Liz continuing to work on methods for detection of synchronous spiking chains in multichannel data. Results presented at Spike Train Network Workshop on ‘Patterns’. Stuart Baker group (Newcastle) entering into collaboration with Jianfeng Feng group (Warwick) through sharing of Stuart Baker data. Jose Vega commenced work on 1st September as the second CARMEN RA working with Stuart Baker. Roman Borisyuk group (Plymouth) working on application of measures of ‘proximity’ in social networks to functional correlation in multichannel data. It is planned that these will be implemented in the Neuraster framework.

WP6 (Jennifer Simonotto): Marcus Kaiser has a new publication accepted to the New Journal of Physics on ‘network clustering’, and is also working on a first grant application to EPSRC which may include some peripheral support for CARMEN. Stephen Eglen working with Phillip Lord and Dan Swan to test the InstantSOAP framework for R. Feedback to follow at the next telcon. JS working on understanding web services with Dan Swan tutorial materials. Beginning to convert Matlab codes in deployable forms. Mark Cunningham and Miles Whittington continuing to gather data, including rendered images of the anatomy of the neurones they are recording from. Anne Smith and Christoph Echtermeyer beginning to work on analysis of data from Evelyne Sernagor. Evelyne also working on a publication on Neuraster with Liz Stuart.

Any Other Business

The agenda for the next consortium meeting was discussed. Participants were invited to propose discussion topics.

Next Telcon

2pm 24th September