Brain Initiative Meeting - Day 2

Happy to give you an update on Day 2 of the Brain Initiative PI meeting in DC. First of all, a meeting that has sessions titled "Understanding the Brain" is a great and creative meeting!

• I attended a truly intriguing session on high performance computing, software infrastructure, and data sharing. There are tons of efforts going on that focus on figuring out how we can best share the huge piles of data we are accummulating. This is clearly a question that I need to think more about for the Frohlich Lab... though it sounded there is not quite yet a consensus on how data sharing should be done. Clearly also something for us to think about at our company that will release a data management platform for our non-invasive brain stimulation devices in 2017 (learn more over at Pulvinar Neuro).
• Technology dissemination. So many new techniques and tools are being developed that hopefully will be ultimately commercialized. Yet the reality is that many of these tools will have a limited user base and will not satisfy "investors" and even people at universities that aim to translate patents into start up companies. This is very unfortunate. I wish there were a good solution for it. Perhaps we should start to celebrate what I call blue collar companies (small company, tangible and useful product, few employees, little growth but stable and providing well payed and decent jobs to few individuals). My intuition is that our current culture does not reward/respect such companies enough. Let's celebrate those companies and the people behind them. Not every company needs to be the next Facebook.
• Neuroscientists (or at least most of them) are very nice people and a day can go by very quickly with seeing old friends, meeting new people, and having fun discussing science!
• Diversity. I just wish there were more diversity of attendees. Just saying.

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