Dates and Location
- Dates: Monday, August 4, 2025, 9 AM to Wednesday, August 6, 2025, 5:30 PM
- Location: Flatiron Institute, 162 5th Ave, New York, NY 10010, USA
Overview
The Neurodata Without Borders (NWB) team is organizing a community hackathon to bring together scientists, research software engineers, and students who want to become involved with NWB development, tool integration, outreach, and/or training by hacking on projects together. This hackathon will enable participants to work intensively on NWB-related projects with the assistance of the NWB development team and others in the community.
This is the first NWB hackathon event hosted by the Flatiron Institute, which is home to active projects in the NWB software ecosystem, such as Pynapple, NeMoS, Neurosift, and CaImAn. Hackathon projects can be on any topic, but projects that relate to NWB integration with these tools are encouraged.
Objective
The Neurodata Without Borders project is an effort to standardize the description and storage of neurophysiology data and metadata. NWB enables data sharing and reuse and reduces the energy barrier to applying data analytics both within and across labs. NWB has seen wide adoption in the neurophysiology community, and there are now over 300 datasets on the DANDI Archive in NWB, including data from the Allen Institute and the International Brain Laboratory.
The NWB Community Hackathon will bring neuroscientists, tool builders, and research software engineers together to further the development of the NWB software ecosystem, including the data standard, core software packages, official tools, and community tools. Members of the community will exchange ideas and best practices for using NWB and the libraries, share NWB-based tools, surface common needs, solve bugs, make feature requests, brainstorm about future funding and collaboration, and make progress on current blockages.
Important Notes
- This community hackathon is not a training event. There will be no introductory-level talks or lessons on how to use NWB.
- If you are new to NWB but still interested in attending, the NWB team provides many video tutorials and online documentation.
- If you want to learn how to convert your data to NWB, consider attending the virtual NWB Data Conversion Workshop in May 2025.
- We encourage participants to stay at the hackathon until the very end - Wednesday at 5:30 PM - to participate in the final project presentations.
Logistics
Housing
Housing support is not provided. Housing options near the hackathon will be suggested in May.
Travel
Travel support is not provided.
Dining
Continental breakfast and boxed lunches will be provided, courtesy of the Simons Foundation.
Organizing Committee
- Program chairs: Ryan Ly and Matthew Avalyon
- Site Chair: To be determined
Code of Conduct
Please see the Code of Conduct for all NWB events.