Inventory of Brain Projects Working Group

An Inventory of Brain Projects was envisioned as service to aggregate data for the funded projects, funding opportunities, and resources created by nationally-sponsored brain projects that comprise the International Brain Initiative. An Inventory Working Group developed recommendations for a funding analyzer, open to the worldwide community. An IBI Funding Analyzer was launched and tested from 2020 to mid-2022. The IBI Funding Analyzer contained data from the EU Human Brain Project, the US BRAIN Initiative, and the Japan Brain/MINDS project. Limited information about funded research can now be accessed through the NIH RePORTER tool, which provides partial data for global neuroscience projects based on available data from US funded projects.

Inventory Working Group History and Activities

The National Science Foundation, a participant in the US BRAIN Initiative, funded the workshop Developing a Global Inventory of Brain Initiatives with grant DBI-1822398. Melina Hale and Patrick Hof, Inventory Working Group members and Principal Investigators on the grant, organized a workshop of neuroscientists from 13 different countries with a broad but deep range of interests and experience in neuroscience. The workshop, with additional support from The Kavli Foundation, took place July 23^rd and 24^th, 2018, at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC. This workshop served to provide input to the International Brain Initiative on the content and structure of the Inventory, with a focus on what types of information about global neuroscience efforts would be most useful for the scientific community to know. Workshop participants contributed their ‘blue-sky’ ideas for Inventory features and use-cases, as well as advised on potential risks associated with inventory development and how to mitigate them. A detailed meeting summary is available here.

A follow-up meeting, the International Brain Initiative Inventory: Best Practices in Systems Implementation Workshop, took place on October 22^nd and 23^rd, 2018, at the University of California at Irvine. This meeting was co-organized by Working Group members Mike Yassa, Satra Ghosh, and Stephanie Albin and co-funded by the UC Irvine Brain Initiative and The Kavli Foundation. The goal of this workshop was to explore more practically what the minimum set of requirements for the Inventory should be, and how to make the Inventory accessible and useful to the global neuroscience community. The workshop included a series of information blitzes on existing platforms and expertise, which is being used to inform Inventory development. A meeting summary is available here.

As an outcome of this second workshop, a Funding Analyzer tool was prototyped, with support from The Kavli Foundation. The Funding Analyzer tool tackled the challenges researchers and funders face, to make grant and project-based information open. Ultimately, the prototype was discontinued due to the challenge of maintaining and curating data sources.

Inventory Working Group (active 2019-2021):

• Amy Bernard, Allen Institute for Brain Science (co-chair)
• Stephanie Albin, The Kavli Foundation (co-chair)
• Mathew Abrams, International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF)
• Guo-Qiang Bi, University of Science and Technology of China
• Maria Luisa Bringas-Vega, Cuban Neuroscience Center and Joint China-Cuba Laboratory for Translational Neurotechnology, Cuba
• Satrajit Ghosh,  Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School, USA
• Jeffrey Grethe, University of California at San Diego, USA
• Melina Hale, The University of Chicago, USA
• Sean Hill, Krembil Center for Neuroinformatics at CAMH, Toronto, Canada
• Patrick Hof, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, USA
• David Keator, University of California at Irvine, USA
• David Kennedy, University of Massachusetts Medical School, USA
• Sandhya Koushika, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, India
• Agnes McMahon, The Kavli Foundation
• Toshihisa Ohtsuka, University of Yamanashi, Japan
• Samantha White, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, USA
• Michael Yassa, University of California at Irvine, USA
• Ping Zheng, Fudun University, Shanghai, China