 I wanted to just give an introduction to the INCF itself. I know that many of you already know this, but there's a lot of changes that are going on in the organization. And for those of you who are new to the INCF, I hope this will serve a little bit as an introduction of who we are and what we do. So the INCF is really a standards and best practices organization for neuroscience. It was founded back in 2006 in recognition that neuroscience was going to be moving from a more cottage industry to run by individual researchers into the digital realm with pools of shared data, infrastructures that were going to serve this data. INCF was a key institution in catalyzing this growth worldwide and it has adapted and changed as the world itself has changed. So currently it's a network of researchers in 18 countries across four continents working together with funders, publishers, industry organizations to promote and facilitate data reuse and reproducibility through the promulgation and the development of open standards and best practices. You can see the current members right here and a little bit about the organization of the community. Essentially, this is just a little glimpse into it because you will often hear these referred to during the course of this Congress. INCF is run by a governing board. I'm the current chair of the governing board and these are representatives, funding representatives, but also science representatives, high level representatives from the full member countries. The Council of Training on Training Science and Infrastructure or the CTSI is headed by J.B. Bolline. Raise your hand right there. This is comprised of full and associate members. It sets scientific goals oversight of standing committees and working groups. We do have standing committees. We'll talk a lot about the Standards and Best Practices Committee during this talk, but there are also means for members to get together. Parts of the INCF community can propose special interest groups and working groups, so if you want to get together, if you see a need where Standards and Best Practices would really help serve neuroinformatics and neuroscience, anyone is free to propose and organize one of these working groups and INCF provides some support for that so that you can bring your colleagues together from around the world to work on these types of interesting projects. The INCF Networks itself supports the development and also endorsement of open and fair community standards and best practices, what we call SBPs for neuroscience. There's going to be a brand new portion of the INCF website called Training Space. INCF has traditionally run workshops. I hope many of you went to the workshops yesterday where you get more in-depth training on various aspects of informatics, but now the web portal itself, which I'll talk about in a moment, is going to aggregate courses from around the world that allow you to learn a lot about informatics and the practice of informatics. INCF has taken a leading role in serving as an interface between the international large brain scale projects. There's no secret to many of you that we are in the age of large global brain projects, brain initiative HBP in Europe, brain initiative in the US, brain minds, others that are going on in Japan and elsewhere. And there are summits and things that bring these together, but INCF is really focusing on the infrastructure, the infrastructure and the standards and best practices that are going to allow these projects to function and bind them together. It partners with international stakeholders to promote and prioritize neuroinformatics at a global, national and local level. So I think INCF has been very successful in various new member countries in allowing neuroinformatics to be established and to grow, which has been one of its core strengths and core successes, I would say, over the last decade. INCF is also now, as you may see on your bags and every place else, the, I would say, the community developer and promulgator of fair neuroscience. Fair, I think you'll hear about that later by a talk by Carol Goble, stands for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. These are the fair data principles. And INCF is taking a leading role in defining what fair means for neuroscience by coordinating the standards and best practices. And recently in 2018, we established the Standards and Best Practices Committee. Even previously, INCF had been involved in developing standards, but now we've broadened that out to having a review and endorsement, a quality control of these standards. So the Standards and Best Practices Committee reviews what has been done. They make sure that they support open and fair neuroscience and there's an endorsement procedure. So you see some of these have gone through the endorsement procedure and they get an endorsement badge. That's really meant to stand for quality. It means that these are well supported, well maintained, well governed and that you can rely on these standards if you are going to be developing an infrastructure or starting a new project. The new thing about INCF standards work is where in the past, most of these came from working groups and task forces that were established by the INCF. So INCF was responsible for developing these de novo. Now because the world is so big, these brain projects are so big, INCF is now allowing these to be nominated from the outside because there's a lot of good work that's going on. There's no need to reinvent. Everybody has seen that cartoon about reinventing a new standard. There's no need to do that many times. But having an independent review that makes sure that they are doing what they're intended and that they will serve neuroscience. They're not overlapping. This is a very important function that INCF is taking on. I note in many of my talks that FAIR really is a partnership. We know that researchers need to be concerned about FAIR and there's things that they need to do. Good data management, make sure they manage their metadata. They need to have sharing permissions. All kinds of things that they need to be able to do, they have to submit to a repository. Repositories and registries, those of you who are running neuroinformatics or neuroscience infrastructures, these are key implementers of FAIR. Because they need to make sure that there's machine based access, things like persistent identifiers. There's a lot for repositories and registries to do. There's roles for indexes and aggregators, Google data, others need to make sure that they have things that they can index. So FAIR is actually a fairly broad and complicated set of requirements that have to be implemented across different stakeholders. And I really think that community organizations like INCF that provide a forum for people to come together across these different stakeholder groups, discuss them, decide what's right for neuroscience. Again, if you have 15 competing standards, it's very hard to become a standard space science. You need to have some coordination around it. And INCF is, in my view, the only organization that can fill this role for global neuroscience. So who is INCF for? Neuroinformaticians, certainly. I recognize many faces here before there was something called neuroinformatics, right? We started to develop this. We've been working on this for decades. And I think neuroinformatics is firmly established as a discipline. And you're going to hear some very exciting talks about the state of neuroinformatics, new approaches to how we can interrogate the brain and work with neuroscience data to propel discovery science. All of that happens. But of course, we also need to serve the neuroscience researcher who actually needs tools, training, and means and mechanisms for them to both utilize neuroinformatics inside of their own practice, but also, again, to fulfill these new mandates that are coming about data sharing and understanding how they need to share and manage their own data. We are also, I think, the key organization for infrastructure providers and tool developers. There are many repositories around the world that have been set up, many infrastructures that have to host data. There are a lot of issues that are involved in that. And there are new issues because they serve both academics, sometimes clinical interests. And I think that infrastructure providers for large scientific projects need a place, again, where they can develop their skills, share expertise, and learn. So INCF is going to be developing a lot of materials, parts of the Congress that provide a forum for those of you out there who have that daunting task of fielding an infrastructure for neuroscience. Usually you're underfunded, understaffed, and underappreciated. And I think that those things, I think that having a home where you can come and learn your trade is really, really important. But also I think INCF is an important resource for funders. There's many funders around the world who are trying to push their constituents and communities towards open and fair neuroscience. But it's not a natural way for most neuroscientists to practice. I said, this is really a new way that we have to work. And that needs to be developed and promulgated, and people need to be trained in that so that when these new projects pop up in these local domains, there's a pool of expertise that can be drawn on that can help jumpstart and teach what it means to be fair and open. So I think INCF is more irrelevant and more important than ever as informatics has started to explode. So I mentioned several times that INCF has established a means now for endorsing standards and best practices. This is the Standards and Best Practices Committee. It takes nominations from the community. So if you have developed a really good standard or recommendation for a best practice inside your large project, you are welcome to submit that to the INCF. The INCF will conduct an independent review, give you very helpful feedback. We can always learn to do our work better. And it will look for things like, do you adhere to the fair principles? How are you dealing with persistent identifiers? We really are very strongly taking our cue from other standards organizations to make sure that there are independent implementations out there of whatever it is that you propose. So it's not good enough that you and your friends perhaps use it and that you've written a paper about it because we all know, again, neuroinformatics is a scientific discipline. We have to work within our domains. We have to publish, but we really want to make sure that this is outwardly facing. And so the Standards and Best Practices Committee takes as their charge not the informatics community who are developing these, but the people who need to use them. And will this serve their purpose as this fit for purpose? One of the best ways we know that that happens is that there's active evidence that people outside of your group have been able to take, adopt and implement this. That generally means there's a lot of support going on for this. That means that there's help, there's tutorial materials, there's software that's backing it up. But I think it's very helpful to have an independent organization who can go out and evaluate these things. Again, our charge in the SBP committee is to make sure that we're serving the neuroscience community that needs these standards rather than the ones that are necessarily developing them. Community governance. This is a very important area that most of us don't think about. A lot of these projects rise up kind of from the bottom up. We get things going. We start to get some traction, and then all of a sudden the questions start to come up of how are decisions made? How do we know if an extension is going to be done? Who manages these extensions? These are questions we all have to address. They're very important. They're evidence of a field that is maturing. But again, I think we all can help each other in trying to point to examples of what is a reasonable governance, what is a transparent governance, and what is not. And of course, you need to have toolings and things that facilitate use. So we welcome you to look at the site. The new INCF portal is going to be released. Where's Matthew? Soon. So the new INCF portal I think is on display out there at the INCF booth, so we welcome you to stop by because I think that these things are much better represented. But INCF has not abandoned the working groups that many of you participated in over the years, where again you have a substrate community support for getting together researchers, informaticians from across different countries and different stakeholder groups to work on a problem. We have special interest groups borrowing something from the Research Data Alliance, which means that if you and your colleagues just want to get together to discuss things about neuroinformatics for aging or reproducibility and best practices because you think this is a need, anybody is welcome to nominate a group and form a group themselves. You can meet at this meeting and there's other online support tools to help you. We also have working groups. Working groups actually can receive paid support. The SIGs get support from meetings, but the working group, there is grant support for that. So if there's a standard and best practice, for example, that is under review by the committee and it looks like some work could be done on harmonizing across two partially overlapping standards, these groups can actually apply for funds from the INCF and have some dedicated resources so that they can work through a problem. Because again, our goal is to make sure that neuroscience is served by robust and harmonious if we will, or interoperable standards. So these are again open to the different members and we hope that you will take advantage of them. INCF is also actively promoting the use of standards and best practices. There's not a conference you go at where people are talking about neuroscience data where someone goes, we need standards and best practices, we need standards and best practices, but it usually dies right there because nobody knows what the standards and best practices are. They don't necessarily know how to use them. So INCF is launching a new portal. The standards and best practices area will be greatly expanded. This is an example of a page here. It'll give you a description of the standard, links to the reviews, appropriate use cases, tools. Most importantly, online tutorials, training courses and discussion forums where if you have a question about what to do, you can link to it. INCF maintains a NeuroStars channel and that is actively used by people, for example, who are using bids to ask questions and receive answers. So I think it's going to be a really nice integrated system that's really going to help promote the standards and best practices. And we're working with various groups. In the coming years, we're really going to emphasize working with publishers and reviewers to make sure that they know that these services are available to them so that as these questions come up in different contexts, there is a resource that people can go to to find out what the state of the art is. I mentioned training space. This is, again, facilitating the use of an uptake of standards and best practices. This is where INCF has been gathering content. So again, there's a lot of content that is produced by INCF itself because they've been very active in putting together really good workshops, lectures, and other things around neuroinformatics tools. And that content is all there. But now that has been brought in and expanded by content that comes from Society for Neuroscience or FENS through their CAHAL program, or the European HBP, is putting all of their training materials inside of training space. So this is going to be a very rich aggregation of things that can help introduce you to neuroinformatics, work through a particular problem, all available for free and nicely organized in the new portal. INCF has also launched what I'm calling the Brain Summit series. INCF, again, there is something called the IBI, which has been a platform for the large international brain projects to get together. But INCF really focuses, again, on infrastructure standards and best practices and making sure that there is a forum for those who are running the infrastructures to get together and work through their problems. We had our first brain summit back in 2018 in Stockholm. The next one is going to be in 2020. And this one is going to be held in conjunction with the U.S. Brain Initiative. We're working to try to schedule that right ahead of the annual meeting of the U.S. Brain Initiative, where we hope we'll be able to do things like introduce the INCF standards and best practices process, but also, again, really focus on practical issues that infrastructure providers are actually working on, things like how do I make my data available for Google data set search, right? What is the state of the art there? I think that there's a lot of issues on licensing and things where people could use some help, and we want these brain summits to be that forum. We won't, of course, abandon identifying and supporting opportunities for harmonization, but I think that too often, these conferences focus just on that, and that's a very hard problem, and it's one of the other easier problems that we can tackle. An exciting new direction for INCF is that we're actually trying to expand the network, provide more opportunities for people to participate in INCF beyond the current country-based membership model. So currently, there are only memberships at the national level. You have to have your country come up with the membership fee. We feel that neuroinformatics needs a broader base than that because country memberships are often very hard to get, and they don't always make sense for all countries. So I understand about half the people who've registered for this conference have also become members of INCF at the individual level. There's various discounts and benefits you get as a member as well as supporting the organization, but we now also have institutional and organizational memberships. So if you're running a big project or your university or your department might benefit from this, there's now an opportunity for you to join, and there's a booth outside that will have the membership packages and benefits. This is new, so we're still working through some of the details. But also I think a very important development and exciting development is that we're now opening up membership to commercial entities and companies. We are all in this together. We know that we need to support each other, that there are commercial endeavors that are offering data services and informatics platforms. There's academic ones, and to become members of the organization I think is extremely important. So towards that end, we are forming the INCF Industry Advisory Council, which will allow companies a place to discuss the emerging standards and best practices, a channel for bringing research and industry together so that they can have collaborations. If you become a member of this, you get access to INCF's internal committees and other sorts of things that become actually a functioning member of the organization and not just a booth on the outside. So we really believe again that expanding the memberships at anybody who is interested in serving global neuroscience for open and fair, it's always got to be open and fair, has an opportunity to participate. And again, if you are interested in becoming a member, Helena will be out in the booth, and there's Helena right there, or she's happy to talk to you about these different memberships. Again, we have memberships. The Standards and Best Practices Committee put out a call for reviewers to help with this process. It's a daunting challenge, and we thank all of those who have responded, and we will start, probably put out another call again to help with this. If this is something you're passionate about, we would love you to work with us. The Special Interest Groups and Working Groups, Malin is running those. Is Malin here? He's in the back right there. Again, this is also on the website, and if you identify something at this conference, and you say, hey, there's a really good opportunity for us to do some work on this, just go right ahead, sign it up, and INCF will be happy to support you. And then, of course, if you have any questions at all, INCF is all over the place. I'm happy, JB is happy to answer your questions. Helena, Matthew, Malin. I think there's many people from INCF here. Can you raise your hands? Or are they outside? There we go, pretty deep. So just ask them a question. So, Daniel, thank some of those responsible for allowing this conference to take place. We want to thank all of our sponsors. This has been very generous this year in supporting this conference, this important group of people. So we want to make sure that we acknowledge your support and hope that many of you will go on to become members because, again, we think that this is a unique opportunity to bring the research and commercial community together. And finally, neuroinformatics 2020. That's next year. We're always looking forward. Next year it is going to be in Seattle. That is a really exciting venue for this. We have people from the Allen Brain Institute who are instrumental in getting this together. It's co-hosted by the Australian Node and the U.S. Node. As I'm sure many of you know, this is an epicenter for big tech, and so we think that it's a really exciting opportunity to bring neuroinformatics and neuroscience into this area. And the program is coming along well. You can see machine learning and AI are both prominently featured, but also modern ways of doing and sharing science, right? We always keep to our mission that our goal is to promote open and fair neuroscience. So I think that this is going to be a great conference, and I hope that you all join us in Seattle on August 17th to 21st, okay? So I think that's it for my opening remarks. We want to stay on time. Again, we're available. I'm available for questions the whole conference. And now I'd like to introduce Trig Valiergaard from the University of Oslo, who's going to introduce our first speaker to start the plenary. Thank you.