 Okay so now where our guests are sitting in front of you and I'm asking you to ask the questions concerning the session in which we are trying to figure out what should be the processes triggering the proper integration of science into industry, the proper collaboration within those two groups of the society. We've learned a lot about the culture of, I would say, new science the way our colleagues see it and I would be very grateful for coming concepts from... Well first of all thank you very much for giving me this opportunity to share a few thoughts with you. I think that from my experience in industry and I have to admit first of all, embarrassingly, I'm not a neuroscientist, I'm a molecular biologist, my background is actually in computational genome analysis for the past nearly 30 years but then also in large-scale data analysis, semantic data integration. I think first of all based on the presentations we heard in this session, I think it's great to see that there are initiatives that aim to familiarize people with the latest technologies, the latest methods, provide them with a very solid statistical background and at the same time ensure that the creativity remains there. That's very important and that it's actually huge fun. Having said that, what would help us a lot in industry is to provide this link to, I don't like using this expression to the real world as it were, it doesn't mean that in academic science it's not the real world but there are certain constraints that we are facing in industry. For example, the concept of ISO standards when it comes to data quality management, data security, the concept of intellectual property both in the context of software development but also as link to applications in the pharmaceutical industry. As it was mentioned earlier, is it better? Okay, thank you. Also how to manage a project, to set milestones in a team, the concept of costing a project. Software development is not free in an industrial environment. You need to calculate a budget, you need to provide a quote to a client, you need to make decisions on whether you are going to develop something according to the feedback you get from the users and so on. So this is just a bird's eye view but I think what would help, so how do we get there? I think it would help if we find a way to integrate industry input. For example, get more lectures from industry in the courses with real life case studies from their projects. What are the challenges? How do you address them in a team? And perhaps also the concept of a sandwich course with a one year or six months placement in an industrial project. I noticed this for example in my own family, my stepson just completed a sandwich course in mechanical engineering, three years undergraduate, one year in industry followed by a master's and it helped him enormously. He was thrown at the deep end but all these concepts that I mentioned earlier were on the table and he had to deal with them with great help from his colleagues. So anyway, a long answer. These are my thoughts and I would really like to hear also your thoughts on that. Thank you very much. I do not know, Dmitri, do you have anything to add or what would be your expectations as founder of the company? Expectations. Concerning alumni who are graduating from good university and you would like for instance to get those people working with you. What kind of skills you would expect from them? Well I think first of all the skills is one thing. I think enthusiasm and excitement about. I think there is among more academicians I think there is at least in some subpopulations there is kind of a misconception that if you're idealistic and you want to pursue science you need to be an academy and if you want to kind of get down to the real world, support your family then you go to the industry. But there are just different aspects and you can pursue noble goals. You just work a little bit differently. I think working in the company it's more about team goal setting rather than individual. I know working with the PI and working on it. So it's a slightly different mindset and so projects move faster in the sense of you have many more people working on the same. It's very common in academia to be working for five years or something and projects are much more fast-paced and there is a lot more communication. So I think one of the main things is to bring that enthusiasm for science and for accomplishing something, for improving the world and turn that into a product and then into an idea. That's what I would be looking for in people who are coming to work for a company. Thank you. Don't you think that what we are discussing now in a sense that would show that we should I'm talking now about teachers, academicians. We should start it much, much earlier than we used to because our contacts are usually starting at the level of the master studies of our students. Then sometimes we have some common projects if we have the contacts with outside companies. I'd go so far as to say that even undergraduate level that perhaps science related courses have modules that are business management focused as well just to at least give people an understanding and a flavor of the sorts of things that businesses are looking for in terms of things to think about costing budgets, those sorts of things but also managing people, HR and those more kind of business management skills I think would be possibly quite a useful starting point. That's why I was addressing also something what was projected in build stock, namely in a sense what we are observing nowadays that we are facing a totally new culture of building up contacts between academia and industry. Whether we call it industry or economy, economic environment it doesn't matter but that should be something totally different. You're telling us about for instance intellectual property. Well I think that the day someone is bringing me the data from the company, let it be a bank as a good example. First of all we would be happy to analyze those data not all of them would be the data which can be shared with us. The question is to what extent you see this type of processes also are going on in companies? Do people are aware of the fact that right at the corner it might be a group of young students who would be willing to see how to analyze? I think there's a perception by industry that universities are more interested in what they can get out of the data and what they can secure in terms of IP and and and kudos for themselves and I think and whilst that may or may not be the case and some universities are stronger at it and more and hold on to these things more vehemently than others I do think that sometimes businesses can think that that's why we need to hold on to the data ourselves and we're not ready to collaborate in that in that way. There's an example quite recently where I've been investigating costing a clinical trial for for a client and potentially going through a university in the first question the university said to me was what about co-authoring who owns the data can we publish and that's not always necessarily what the industry want to hear. Yeah thank you this is a very good remark. Also especially since we are talking about neuroscience another interesting aspect which often talking to students I feel is that there is a gap in the knowledge is the fact that if you're working in the pharmaceutical industry or in the diagnostic therapeutic technology medical technologies industry you also have additional constraints from regulatory authorities and especially the fact that software can be a medical device this is very important. So this I just mentioned is another concept which I think will be increasingly common in the future. So this interface of technology software and directly than the application with with the patient at the end I think there's a lot of there's a lot of mileage there in terms of case studies in terms of raising the awareness and building excellent teaching examples in in this area and that's something that certainly the industry sectors I mentioned would greatly appreciate. Yes so I think we should get the voice to to the you are you're the first. Yes I was the first. Sorry I just sure come on. All right this this will just go out to the speakers my name is Dr. Bandrovsky I wear many hats both industry and academic so the question though that I wanted to ask and I appreciated you talking about the standards and I appreciated you guys talking about data that's fantastic what about standard databases what about the curation of those because I did not hear the word curation come out of any of your talk maybe I missed it I could have you know glossed over it for a second but it certainly is not part of any of the curricula that I'm I'm aware of and this is a very fast growing field very few standards exist in it now there's some you know data curators around genomics but outside of genomics it's it's a it's a waste land there's there's nothing out there and there's just people kind of in the Wild West doing things without standards so I wonder if you guys can address and think about you know what are the core databases out there for you know if you're gonna talk about data well you're gonna have to talk about databases it's not just data and then the questions are well how do you get that data to be aligned because we know that aligned data is actually useful non-aligned data is just a large pile of work so I I wonder if you could take that on think about standards curation data alignment as part of any curriculum in neuroinformatics I can maybe answer how we we do that in the context of neuro Academy because I agree with you that those things are very important specifically that that community is focused on human neuroscience and particularly on MRI data and so we teach about bids and we had Chris Gorgolowski come for a brief visit from back from industry from his time in industry to talk about bids and present that to to those individuals and part of the activities they did during the hackathon is take some data sets from their own research and convert them into the the bid standard and I think we we make an effort to explain why that is a useful thing to do so one of the big projects that was funded and might might exist here is Spark and we had adapted bids to that particular project because bids only covers neuroimaging so far and it has a lot of other data types so it will be very interesting we have not yet let the community know about that I think an important point thing to point to make about the difference between industry and and academia is that for many of the experiments that people do there it's too it's premature to start standardizing right because then you leave no room for creativity and creating new kinds of data and so on so that's always a danger as well but I grew through those kinds of things are good to start formalizing from the back so I have just one comment and and one question I like very much your observation about the sandwich courses in your informatics so you know I'm aware of the number of neuroinformatics students here actually have jobs in industry and I've always been thinking about this as sort of detrimental but I realize that it's just the opposite it's actually an opportunity and perhaps it would be an idea just to sort of formalize it and just get you know collaboration actually with some industrial partners and my daughter actually has just entered the chemical technology sandwich course she's starting this year so I'm very curious how he's going to work you know when I was a kid we had no things like that so my colleagues who teach computer science expect their graduate students to be gone about three months a year during the summer because they go off and do internships in industry very well paid internships in industry so they can make up for the fact that they're right paid as much the rest of the year I think it'd be great if neuroscientists were expected to go and do it right I mean I just realized that you would actually formalize that sort of try to make ties with sort of meaningful industries just to actually you know make this a part of the curriculum but the question I have is you know I when I was listening when I was listening to Yarek and Bill you know both of you saying in a way very similar things but from two different perspectives of physicists and the biologists and I was wondering you know if there is a way to actually have a joint curriculum which would appeal you know to both disciplines like you know something that you know you have biologists and physicists sort of coming together and then you know maybe ending up as those different bees that Bill presented us but or do we really have to think that you know really need to put those curriculum in different departments so that you have you know sort of neuroinformatics for the biologists and neuroinformatics for the physicists neuroinformatics for the computer scientists I don't know what do you think right right I would certainly hope that it doesn't get that splintered my dream is that eventually universities will turn to what they once were when they didn't have departments because so many of us work across departments but the money flow isn't at this point it's orthogonal to that so that's my take I hope we wouldn't do that I hope you could have like many courses here there and it be part of a grander curriculum well that's what I said that especially at the second cycle we have the opportunity for the students to mingle between different so we can compose a curriculum that is suitable for a given student if he's even if he's he finished the first cycle here but he's interested more in biology he just takes courses nearby the biology department not that much I would say from biology in fact I think I haven't had any I have we have from neurocognitive neurocognitivistic studies it's fair of math perhaps yes they are probably afraid of math okay but I mean is it I mean is it something that when students come into the department for the first time that those links between the different disciplines aren't obvious to them I know that from a neuroscience point of view and an engineering mechanical engineering point of view an electrical engineering point of view those two connections aren't necessarily obvious but yet when you sit an engineer was down with a neuroscientist massively brilliant things can happen so it's you know how do we kind of get those guys talking right when they first really start getting interested and start studying this properly for the first time apart from the sandwich course which of course is a major commitment at that point you need to have made up your mind that is what you would like to do perhaps you can have a rotation between departments so interested engineering students can sign up for a few presentations or lectures in neuroscience and vice versa and they will probably I would imagine that quite a few of them will discover that hey this is interesting this is actually what I would like to do and find out more about it I certainly experienced that in in genomics when the field was very young in the 80s with DNA sequencing still very expensive and slow and people started coming in to buy informatics from physics from mathematics from engineering from astrophysics even and they had to learn the biological concepts but they were so fascinated and they they love the field so much and many of these colleagues made enormous contributions to the field they brought a completely different angle so and I think that would be perhaps an interesting option to to consider on the teaching level yes thank you and we have some voices from the back I was just wondering if there is some experience of industry personal people going and actually giving part of some courses in universities and at least you know in some aspect of a technique or and then you know of course there's a potential conflict of interest to be careful of but you know it would be I was just wondering whether there's some experience of that well certainly in the area of drug discovery I have seen that in in London at Birkbeck College where I used to teach we had scientists coming in from big farmers explaining giving lectures on drug discovery the challenges what is a target validation how does a clinical trial work and so on so and that certainly works very well so there's no reason why we couldn't do the same in computational neuroscience just just wanted to add to that brain box initiative are running a computational neuroscience course in Switzerland in Leon at some point later on this year or next year so there are the brain box initiative is sort of a program of activities designed to kind of promote early researchers work and actually give them hands-on time and experience with with equipment that they may not otherwise be exposed to and we've teamed up with one of the universities down nearly on for a neuroinformatics course so if anybody's interested then go to the website one of the things which I can add that's as an experience brought up by our students in my university is something what was really thought up by them the full initiative coming from them and we were only helpers assistants so the idea was to organize some sort of workshops for the spin-off companies which are already registered which are young and some of them maybe will survive some of them will die but they were I mean both companies were seeking for particular people with skills let's say in the Bayesian analysis or people who are able to understand the time series analysis and model roles we have three conferences in the row year by year organized by students of the master degrees they invited both younger colleagues from the environment and the presentation was made as a sort of a discussion so it was mostly the people who were from those startups coming with the problem and showing the problem and trying to figure out to what extent the audience is responsive to their problems where they are building up any kind of relation and I think this is really something what at least at the level of the university to us to teachers who are sometimes unaware of those newest achievements in solving problems in different companies this is really fantastic way of solving those problems because at the end of the day there are some people who would be able to work together and maybe they will meet and it would be done spontaneously not by us the other thing is of course that we can do it by let's say more legal actions like for instance signing up the agreement yeah one of the banks and saying that we would be giving the courses for the people from from the bank and we expect that someone from the bank will come and give a course in short course in economy and we will work at that level but of course this requires totally different actions so my idea was just to ask you what kind of interaction is valuable from the point of view of people who are working really in industry broad topic I think we certainly when I say we certainly the industry definitely would love to get more involved I've heard from so many colleagues that they are very keen to get involved in teaching and presentations in bridging this this gap because clearly it is in the interest of the of the industry in the long term but at the same time I think it would help in order to to break down the perceived barrier because essentially as you mentioned it's all about having a great idea and having the fun of creating something really nice so there are many models I mean it can be placements can be presentations it can be joint projects I think one needs to explore a little bit what the interests are in the various sectors but I think the certainly the the willingness and the the desire to do that is is there from the industrial side you mentioned the the banks for example I think since we are talking about computational applications it's not only about the concepts of economics but specifically in this area FinTech software development what are the constraints what are the real life stories the challenges and transfer this to neuroscience yeah yes please there was also the question from the back I'm sorry it was it's mine is not actually a big question I'm gonna try answer to one of the previous questions on the need for curation and standards and teaching I think she was referring to that so there is actually a lot of growing activity in this area especially when you think of curation as quality control INCF we started a specialist group in this aspect and we are running a lot of courses at various conferences and the webinar series is also coming the problem there is that people are aware of the issues there are just not enough resources to actually push that through and make it happen right so these are all many side projects to many PIs but to make it happen we need to throw more resources towards that thank you thank you the comment or because I'm sorry there was also one question which we have not addressed so yeah thanks so much for a really interesting day I'm still thinking about Carol's talk earlier and one of her stories had a big bad wolf of the senior investigator being one of the barriers in particular around incentives so who's working on trainings for senior faculty you're asking in general I mean it seems yeah this is something what should be planned for the future all right all right so I think I have enough white hair to be senior if you're a senior faculty member you have to go out and get it so I kind of learned and went to some workshops on FSL I'm gonna go to the software carpentry workshop that Ari's putting on because I think I need more programming skills yeah but as far as changing the culture is that your question no no I'm asking who is making trainings workshops YouTube videos that are specifically designed for senior faculty to the best of my knowledge no one no one is contacting them or maybe they should contact the others closing this session I mean I should then start this but there are actually some materials for the faculty I mean so there's a book at the helm by Kathy Barker and I think Howard Hughes actually had some some book I mean so this is definitely being discussed in academia not in the neuroinformatics context but I mean people are aware that you know we are essentially expected to be managers when we become PIs right and nobody is trained as I mean we are being I don't know thought physics or mathematics computer science neuroscience right and then say okay now you're going to manage this lab but I mean this is that's a very good point yes this is this is a very big point and we should be keeping this but I mean I think this is it you're not going to do I mean because there's a poster session and it's going to be reception I guess everybody's waiting for that so I wanted to close it but I just give it over to Eva to do it and you can comment I mean so I'll do it there okay so so Billy's not commenting well so if event event was supposed to be the end of that session I thank you all of our guests