BrainKDD 2015 - 2nd International Workshop on Data Mining for Brain Science (BrainKDD)

Today, brain science is experiencing rapid changes and is expected to have major advances in the near future. In April 2013, U.S. President Barack Obama formally announced the Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies Initiative, the BRAIN Initiative, proposing to record the complete activity patterns of each neuron in real time in order to generate a Brain Activity Map. In Europe, the European Commission has recently launched the European Human Brain Project (HBP), aiming at creating an integrated platform for generating and aggregating brain data. In the private sector, the Allen Institute for Brain Science is embarking on a new 10-year plan to generate comprehensive, large-scale data in the mammalian cerebral cortex under the MindScope project. These ongoing and emerging projects are expected to generate a deluge of data that capture the brain activities at different levels of organization. There is thus a compelling need to develop the next generation of data mining and knowledge discovery tools that allow one to make sense of this raw data and to understand how neurological activity encodes information. Organization of this workshop in conjunction with SIGKDD 2015 would allow us to bring computer and brain scientists together at the very beginning of this forthcoming revolution in big brain data analytics.
This workshop will focus on exploring the forefront between computer science and brain science and inspiring fundamentally new ways of mining and knowledge discovery from a variety of brain data. The presentations and discussions of this workshop will lead to novel insights and knowledge on the function and dysfunction of brain at various levels, ranging from molecular, cellular, circuitry to systems levels by mining, integrating, and interpreting large-scale, multi-modality brain data. This will be achieved by bringing together neuroscientists and computer scientists in a dedicated workshop that consists of invited talks, paper and poster presentations, and interactive discussions. The list of tentative topics includes:
? Mining of in situ hybridization and microarray gene expression data
? Mining of brain connectivity and circuitry data
? Mining of structural and functional MRI data
? Mining of EEG and related data
? Mining of temporal developing brain data
? Mining of spatial neuroimaging data
? Integrative mining of multi-modality brain data
? Mining of diseased brain data, such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and schizophrenia
? Segmentation and registration of neuroimaging data
This workshop is targeted to attract participants from academia, industry, government, and private institutions. The academia audience includes researchers in computational neuroscience, bioinformatics, biological and brain data mining, brain imaging, biomedical informatics, healthcare data mining, deep learning and neural networks. The industry target audience includes persons from pharmaceutical companies manufacturing drugs for curing neurological diseases. Federal government and funding agencies, including NSF, NIH and DARPA, have been actively organizing and participating workshops on brain research. The currently proposed workshop may also attract participants from these organizations. This workshop is also expected to attract people from private institutions, such as the Kavli Foundation, Allen Institute for Brain Science, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
Understanding brain function is one of the greatest challenges facing science. A human brain contains billions of neurons; each of them is connected to thousands of other neurons. These neurons communicate with each other on a time scale of milliseconds. Therefore, an enormous amount of data is required to faithfully capture the spatial and temporal activities of the brain. For example, the Allen Institute of Brain Science is generating about one petabyte of brain data each year. The amount of raw brain data is expected to increase dramatically in the coming decades, creating urgent needs for developing novel and efficient mathematical and algorithmic tools for managing, mining, and integrating big brain data sets. SIGKDD is a premier conference for cutting-edge data mining and knowledge discovery tools and applications, and organization of this workshop in conjunction with SIGKDD 2015 would facilitate the development of brain data analytics tools at the very beginning of this data deluge.