Neo 0.5.0-alpha1 released

We are pleased to announce the first alpha release of Neo 0.5.0.

Neo is a Python library which provides data structures for working with electrophysiology data, whether from biological experiments or from simulations, together with a large library of input-output modules to allow reading from a large number of different electrophysiology file formats (and to write to a somewhat smaller subset, including HDF5 and Matlab).

For Neo 0.5, we have taken the opportunity to simplify the Neo object model. Although this will require an initial time investment for anyone who has written code with an earlier version of Neo, the benefits will be greater simplicity, both in your own code and within the Neo code base, which should allow us to move more quickly in fixing bugs, improving performance and adding new features. For details of what has changed and what has been added, see the Release notes.

If you are already using Neo for your data analysis, we encourage you to give the alpha release a try. The more feedback we get about the alpha release, the quicker we can find and fix bugs. If you do find a bug, please create a ticket. If you have questions, please post them on the mailing list or in the comments below.

Documentation:

http://neo.readthedocs.io/en/neo-0.5.0alpha1/

Licence:

Modified BSD

Source code:

https://github.com/NeuralEnsemble/python-neo

Updated Docker images for biological neuronal network simulations with Python

The NeuralEnsemble Docker images for biological neuronal network simulations with Python have been updated to contain NEST 2.10, NEURON 7.4, Brian 2.0rc1 and PyNN 0.8.1.

In addition, the default images (which are based on NeuroDebian Jessie) now use Python 3.4. Images with Python 2.7 and Brian 1.4 are also available (using the "py2" tag). There is also an image with older versions (NEST 2.2 and PyNN 0.7.5).

The images are intended as a quick way to get simulation projects up-and-running on Linux, OS X and Windows. They can be used for teaching or as the basis for reproducible research projects that can easily be shared with others.

The images are available on Docker Hub.

To quickly get started, once you have Docker installed, run

docker pull neuralensemble/simulation
docker run -i -t neuralensemble/simulation /bin/bash

For Python 2.7:

docker pull neuralensemble/simulation:py2

For older versions:

docker pull neuralensemble/pynn07

For ssh/X11 support, use the "simulationx" image instead of "simulation". Full instructions are available here.

If anyone would like to help out, or suggest other tools that should be installed, please contact me, or open a ticket on Github.

PyNN 0.8.1 released

Having forgotten to blog about the release of PyNN 0.8.0, here is an announcement of PyNN 0.8.1!

For all the API changes between PyNN 0.7 and 0.8 see the release notes for 0.8.0. The main change with PyNN 0.8.1 is support for NEST 2.10.

PyNN 0.8.1 can be installed with pip from PyPI.

What is PyNN?

PyNN (pronounced 'pine' ) is a simulator-independent language for building neuronal network models.

In other words, you can write the code for a model once, using the PyNN API and the Python programming language, and then run it without modification on any simulator that PyNN supports (currently NEURON, NEST and Brian as well as the SpiNNaker and BrainScaleS neuromorphic hardware systems).

Even if you don't wish to run simulations on multiple simulators, you may benefit from writing your simulation code using PyNN's powerful, high-level interface. In this case, you can use any neuron or synapse model supported by your simulator, and are not restricted to the standard models.

The code is released under the CeCILL licence (GPL-compatible).

EU Human Brain Project Releases Platforms to the Public

"Geneva, 30 March 2016 — The Human Brain Project (HBP) is pleased to announce the release of initial versions of its six Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Platforms to users outside the Project. These Platforms are designed to help the scientific community to accelerate progress in neuroscience, medicine, and computing.

[...]


The six HBP Platforms are:

• The Neuroinformatics Platform: registration, search, analysis of neuroscience data.
• The Brain Simulation Platform: reconstruction and simulation of the brain.
• The High Performance Computing Platform: computing and storage facilities to run complex simulations and analyse large data sets.
• The Medical Informatics Platform: searching of real patient data to understand similarities and differences among brain diseases.
• The Neuromorphic Computing Platform: access to computer systems that emulate brain microcircuits and apply principles similar to the way the brain learns.
• The Neurorobotics Platform: testing of virtual models of the brain by connecting them to simulated robot bodies and environments.

All the Platforms can be accessed via the HBP Collaboratory, a web portal where users can also find guidelines, tutorials and information on training seminars. Please note that users will need to register to access the Platforms and that some of the Platform resources have capacity limits."

   ... More in the official press release here.

 The HBP held an online release event on 30 March:

Prof. Felix Schürmann (EPFL-BBP, Geneva), Dr. Eilif Muller (EPFL-BBP, Geneva), and Prof. Idan Segev (HUJI, Jerusalem) present an overview of the mission, tools, capabilities and science of the EU Human Brain Project (HBP) Brain Simulation Platform:

A publicly accessible forum for the BSP is here:
https://forum.humanbrainproject.eu/c/bsp
and for community models
https://forum.humanbrainproject.eu/c/community-models
and for community models of hippocampus in particular
https://forum.humanbrainproject.eu/c/community-models/hippocampus

Released - BluePyOpt 0.2 : Leveraging OSS and the cloud to optimise models to neuroscience data

BluePyOpt

The BlueBrain Python Optimisation Library (BluePyOpt) is an extensible framework for data-driven model parameter optimisation that wraps and standardises several existing open-source tools. It simplifies the task of creating and sharing these optimisations, and the associated techniques and knowledge. This is achieved by abstracting the optimisation and evaluation tasks into various reusable and flexible discrete elements according to established best-practices. Further, BluePyOpt provides methods for setting up both small- and large-scale optimisations on a variety of platforms, ranging from laptops to Linux clusters and cloud-based compute infrastructures.

The code is available here:
https://github.com/BlueBrain/BluePyOpt
A preprint to the paper is available here:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.00500

Stop plotting your data -- HoloViews 1.4 released!

We are pleased to announce the fifth public release of HoloViews, a Python package for exploring and visualizing scientific data:

   http://holoviews.org

HoloViews provides composable, sliceable, declarative data structures for building even complex visualizations easily.  Instead of you having to explicitly and laboriously plot your data, HoloViews lets you simply annotate your data so that any part of it visualizes itself automatically.  You can now work with large datasets as easily as you work with simple datatypes at the Python prompt.

The new version can be installed using conda:

   conda install -c ioam holoviews

Release 1.4 introduces major new features, incorporating over 1700 new commits and closing 142 issues:

- Now supports both Bokeh (bokeh.pydata.org) and matplotlib backends, with Bokeh providing extensive interactive features such as panning and zooming linked axes, and customizable callbacks

- DynamicMap: Allows exploring live streams from ongoing data collection or simulation, or parameter spaces too large to fit into your computer's or your browser's memory, from within a Jupyter notebook

- Columnar data support: Underlying data storage can now be in Pandas dataframes, NumPy arrays, or Python dictionaries, allowing you to define HoloViews objects without copying or reformatting your data

- New Element types: Area (area under or between curves), Spikes (sequence of lines, e.g. spectra, neural spikes, or rug plots), BoxWhisker (summary of a distribution), QuadMesh (nonuniform rasters), Trisurface (Delaunay-triangulated surface plots)

- New Container type: GridMatrix (grid of heterogenous Elements)

- Improved layout handling, with better support for varying aspect  ratios and plot sizes

- Improved help system, including recursively listing and searching the help for all the components of a composite object

- Improved Jupyter/IPython notebook support, including improved export using nbconvert, and standalone HTML output that supports dynamic widgets even without a Python server

- Significant performance improvements for large or highly nested data

And of course we have fixed a number of bugs found by our very dedicated users; please keep filing Github issues if you find any!

For the full list of changes, see:

   https://github.com/ioam/holoviews/releases

HoloViews is now supported by Continuum Analytics, and is being used in a wide range of scientific and industrial projects.  HoloViews remains freely available under a BSD license, is Python 2 and 3 compatible, and has minimal external dependencies, making it easy to integrate into your workflow. Try out the extensive tutorials at holoviews.org today!

Jean-Luc R. Stevens
Philipp Rudiger
James A. Bednar

Continuum Analytics, Inc., Austin, TX, USA
School of Informatics, The University of Edinburgh, UK