Revolutions in molecular biology, brain imaging, and similar research areas have produced an enormous, exponentially growing body of complex, interrelated neuroscience data in just the past few years. And this data onslaught is accelerating, not abating. Thus, one grand challenge facing science today is to use these data intelligently, to transform neuroscientific data into facts, and from these facts to extract both knowledge and understanding.
Neuroinformatics,with its powerful methods drawn from information technology, provides the brain sciences with the advanced tools needed to meet this challenge. In the Neuroinformatics Studio, UCLA's unique approach to teaching neuroinformatics to students of neural and cognitive science, students become acquainted with content-driven databases, sophisticated data visualization techniques, scientific computation methods, data-driven pattern extraction methods, neural modeling across a wide range of levels, and methods of electronic collaboration. This is a tall order, but it's an exciting adventure into a brave new world of computation and brain science.
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So what is the UCLA Neuroinformatics Studio? At one level, it is just a well-equipped interactive computer-powered classroom in which informatic applications in neuroscience are taught to UCLA students. But it really is much more than that. The Neuroinformatics Studio embodies a new way of thinking about the brain, about behavior, and about doing science. It is about a change in the traditional sociology of science, about using complex sets of preexisting data in new ways, about powerful informatic methods to answer fundamental questions in neural science, about recycling data and re-authenticating its quality, about working with others in clusters to solve particular problems, and much more. The spirit of the Neuroinformatics Studio is not a UCLA phenomenon, but rather lies at the heart of neuroinformatics world-wide. This is what we hope to teach our students and to share with our visitors at this web site.
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Finally, this UCLA Neuroinformatics Studio program and this web site will be growing with the field. In the coming months you can expect frequent additions to this web site. And if you have suggestions for new material to be included or any other thoughts, please email us at neuroinformatics@ucla.edu. Thanks very much.
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