Insights and lessons from rolling out a thousand brain-wide neural recordings at IBL

The International Brain Laboratory is a collaboration of 22 neuroscience laboratories whose purpose is to advance the understanding of the neural dynamics of decision making. To do so, we standardised a decision-making task in mice. We then deployed the experiment in 11 experimental locations, collecting a thousand of extra-cellular electrophysiology recordings across the mouse brain.

We will present  the outcome of  those brain-wide standardised recordings and highlight the associated scientific projects and contribution to the community.Then, we will  reflect on the challenges of operating at scale. We will cover technical aspects such as data management, quality control and reliability engineering as well as discuss organisational aspects such as project management, credit assignment and outreach.

Given from a research software engineering perspective, this talk and the discussion that will follow is relevant to system neuroscientists, electrophysiologists as well as to anyone interested in the challenges of large-scale computing and collaboration in an academic setup.

About the speaker: Olivier Winter has been a Research Software Engineer (RSE) at the IBL since 2018. Previously, he worked a research geophysicist and technical manager at a major oil contractor. From 2005 he learned about signal processing and the management of large computational pipelines in applied geophysics and shifted directions to join the neuroscience community.