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 100 datasets on the DANDI Archive in NWB, including data from the Allen Institute and the International Brain Laboratory.
The NWB Data Conversion Workshop will train members of the neuroscience community on how to convert their data to NWB and publish it on the DANDI Archive. We will train attendees starting from the basics of the NWB format and proceeding to domain-specific tutorials and advanced data engineering techniques to maximally utilize the features of the HDF5 and Zarr backends. During this workshop, we will introduce multiple sets of tools with varying levels of flexibility for converting your data, including NWB GUIDE, a new no-code user interface for data conversion.
Note: All levels of experience are welcome! We will have tutorials ranging from no-code, automated data conversion to more advanced, custom code conversion.
Logistics
We will be using Gather and Zoom for the meeting and will send an email in the days before the workshop with links.
What to Bring
- Please bring any example datasets you would like to convert. For lab-specific data (i.e., data not in these supported formats), you should ideally have scripts for reading the data using Python or MATLAB.
- Bring your laptop with appropriate software installed. For installation instructions see:
- For an overview of NWB software, see also:
Agenda
Below is the tentative agenda. All times are in Pacific Time (PT, UTC-7).
Day 1 (Monday, May 12)
| Time | Duration | Topic | Type | Speaker(s) | Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 9:00 - 9:15 AM | 15 min | Welcome to the Data Conversion Workshop | Talk | Steph Prince | Gather |
| 9:15 - 10:00 AM | 45 min | Overview of NWB | Talk | Oliver Ruebel | Zoom |
| 10:00 - 10:45 AM | 45 min | NWB GUIDE | Tutorial | Ryan Ly | Zoom |
| 10:45 - 11:45 AM | 1 hour | NeuroConv, PyNWB, MatNWB | Tutorial | Ben Dichter | Zoom |
| 11:45 AM - 12:15 PM | 30 min | Project sharing | Discussion | Steph Prince | Zoom |
| 12:15 - 5:00 PM | 4.75 hours | Data conversion hacking | Hack | Gather |
Day 2 (Tuesday, May 13)
| Time | Duration | Topic | Type | Speaker(s) | Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 9:00 - 9:10 AM | 10 min | Welcome to the workshop | Talk | Steph Prince, Oliver Ruebel | Gather |
| 9:10 - 10:40 AM | 1.5 hours | Tools and data showcase | Discussion | Alessandra Trapani, Steph Prince | Gather |
| 10:45 - 11:15 AM | 30 min | Extensions and TAB discussion | Discussion | Alessio Buccino, Yaroslav Halchenko | Zoom |
| 11:15 AM - 12:00 PM | 45 min | Publishing data and using the DANDI Archive | Tutorial | Ben Dichter | Zoom |
| 12:00 - 12:45 PM | 45 min | How to organize community NWB events | Tutorial | Steph Prince | Zoom |
| 12:45 - 4:00 PM | 3.25 hours | Data conversion hacking | Hack | Gather |
Legend
Talk Presentation sessions
Hack Hands-on coding sessions
Tutorial Tutorials with hacking exercises
Discussion Group conversations and networking
Code of Conduct
Please see the Code of Conduct for all NWB events.