 sponsored by the Australian Centre of Excellence for Integrative Brain Function which is now operating across a number of nodes and I'll speak a little bit about that in a minute. But the actual involvement between Australia and the INCF started a couple of years ago in a formal manner when we formed the Victorian node in February 2013. And we had a launch activity in Melbourne with speakers from the INCF, Sean here and Alan Jones representing the Alan Brain Institute. And at that stage the establishment of the Victorian node was co-supported by the Monash e Research Centre and the massive computing facility at Monash University and the Victorian Life Science and Computational Initiative at the University of Melbourne. So those two computational facilities jointly have supported the establishment of the Victorian node and it was very much seen as a start, albeit small start for us to become as a national node now more comprehensively involved with the INCF. So the idea of the establishment of the Victorian node was to really take advantage of the computational facilities that had been established at both universities in Melbourne and particularly try and drive the neuroscience utilisation of those facilities. It's actually headquartered at Monash Biomedical Imaging at Monash University. And the aims of the node in the outset have been to support the neuroscience research community using computational facilities to contribute to a number of the programs in the INCF, in particular the data sharing, digital atlasing and clinical neuroinformatics. And we'll hear a little bit more about that today. Those three themes represent the three, I think, initial strongest areas of neuroinformatics research and application. And we have been doing that over the last 12 months in cooperation with clinical neuroscientists in a manner similar to the way the INCF itself has been doing that, particularly in Europe. We've achieved one of our aims, which is to hold the Congress in Australia so we can tick that one off. I'm very pleased about that. And we're also, through myself on the INCF training committee, facilitating some training activities including, for example, participation in the Google Summer of Code program over the last couple of years. So the INCF, as most of you probably know, has a governing board and I'm the Australian node representative on that, so if any Australians would like to discuss with me how that works or what the board's doing and what the Australian view on the board is, please see me. We have a coordinator, which thus far has been Boitech Kaczynski, based at the Air Research Centre and we'll hear a presentation from Boitech later today. And you'll get a sense of the engagement that Boitech's been facilitating between at least the Victorian node in the first instance. And in particular, I think it's important for everyone to understand that the node is administratively and managerially supported from the INCF secretariat in Stockholm. So we draw on Linda's team to assist us in doing activities throughout the country or particularly regionally and as well as being engaged in the node's workshops and other activities that the secretariat operate. So the next phase of our node will now move across to the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence. We have now six different institutions that are involved in the Centre of Excellence, which are on the East Coast. So Monash is the lead organisation, University of Queensland here in Queensland, University of Melbourne, Sydney, Australian National University and the University of New South Wales in Sydney. So we now really do have a broad, inclusive group participating in the Centre of Excellence and through that into the Australian node. The node is not meant to be exclusive, but we do have to start in a stage manner so as we get more established we hope that other researchers, other neuroscientists will also participate. And the goals of the Centre of Excellence are very much aligned with the INCF's goals and our key goal is to understand how the brain interacts with the world to really understand the links between brain activity and human behaviour. These are our overarching goals. And as we heard from some of the main speakers yesterday, the real challenge with this is the fact that the brain operates at so many different scales, both temporally and spatially. And so we have recognised in the Centre of Excellence that we have to bridge between brain systems, circuits, neural circuits and cells and synaptic activity. And only actually by bringing together experimental approaches, multi-disciplinary teams, can we now try and tackle essentially the next generation of tough problems to understand how the brain interacts with the world. And we recognise and this is the gestation of the Centre of Excellence that this is beyond really any single laboratory. And so across Australia we've established this Centre of Excellence to address multi-scale and multi-disciplinary studies. We have a couple of other objectives and I'll share them very briefly with you. In addition to the science, we have a strong driver to develop our interdisciplinary science, neuroscience and brain research workforce. And so this is where the ONCF's training program is very important to us. We're looking at developing application, if you like, and utilisation beyond our own research of the software and technologies which are being developed. And we heard yesterday from Arthur Lowry, who's one of the chief investigators in the Centre, about the bionic vision work and the potential to apply that. Well, I don't think Arthur mentioned this, but we're hoping that this will be applied into both sensing and stimulating brain activity with some of the devices that the bionic vision groups have developed. So we're looking at those potential application opportunities and we're also aiming for the Centre to be a focus in Australia for engagement with the large-scale international brain initiatives. And we've initiated that earlier this year in May when we met with some of the researchers from the Human Brain Project. So we're getting started on that front. So our Centre of Scientific Goals are not just focused on integrating activity across these three scales, but it's also using modelling and software technologies to try and integrate the data that's collected and developed theoretical models around relationships of synaptic neural circuit and whole brain systems measures and functional responses. And we'll hear this morning from Peter Robinson, who's a chief investigator in the Centre around the more unified models to try and understand and relate neural activity from these different levels. And this overall approach is being applied to three key types of brain, integrative brain function, and they are attentional processes, prediction or predictive coding and decision-making processes. And you can see that these three integrative functions have behavioural outputs which we can measure and interpret and they have underlying both systems and synaptic and cellular and circuit level phenomena that go to describe those. So we're focused on three key questions. I think that's what perhaps differentiates this Centre of Excellence is the recognising the breadth of the problem. We're trying to integrate methods and scales of brain research, but on three very key specific questions. And so the questions are in the attention space, for example, how does top-down attention alter the gain in neural circuits? An area of research that's been now demonstrated some years ago that both even in primary visual cortex, for example, one of our associate investigators, Trico Biglia-Saga, was able to show that neurons in V1 have their neural activity modulated from top-down attentional processes. And so from that observation and others, we became aware that there are both bottom-up and top-down aspects of attention even in primary cortical areas. So we're using imaging at the top level in attention and developing experiments that are at the circuit level to address these very interesting and exciting question. Secondary prediction or predictive coding is a very hot topic in a range of areas in neuroscience, particularly at the systems level. Can we identify brain circuits that actually are constantly monitoring and updating our expectations of the immediate future? Are there brain regions or circuits that are actually monitoring, if you like, exceptions to our expectations and therefore developing predictive coding responses to the continuous incoming sensory information? So this is an area that we'll hear a bit more about today. Michael Ibbitson is en route and I hope after the morning tea break we'll be able to present that to us. And finally, in decision-making processes, we have a program with Isan Arobsadi, who is not here, but he's leading a very interesting program looking in rodent models of the processes whereby animals at the single synaptic level are monitoring and making decisions and responses to different stimuli, sensory stimuli. So this is a challenging group of different disciplines at different scales of research and with different animal models that we're now molding together into our center research program. But the program is also connected internationally. We have 11 partner investigators. You can see different international organizations, including with the INCF and with Yarn and the Human Brain Project with Sean and Henry Markram, as well as other colleagues in the UK, in Japan, with Kiji Tanaka and others across in the United States, Partha Mitra and Matthew Diamond. So it's a well-connected, internationally well-connected center and we're very keen to further develop and promote that over the next five years of the center's operations. I'll move a little bit now away from the science and just give you a couple of quick pointers around the center's other activities which are summarized somewhat in here in this page on our website, which is cibf.edu.au. And as well as the information about the science, we have a number of other resources we're developing, the computational and neuroinformatics resources that Wojtek is leading. Together, Pulling Gong from Sydney University. We have a brain dialogue program, a public outreach which Rachel Novak is leading from the Monash node. And we have some other activities which are developing, particularly in education for early career researchers and in the social and ethical implications of new discoveries in technologies and neuroscience. So I encourage you to look at the website, which is shown here, and I was going to click through, but I think I'll hopefully move on because last time I tried that it didn't work. Now, one of the activities of the brain dialogue has been, for example, engagement with the public to understand the ethical, the policy and the potential long-term effects of individuals self stimulating with technologies like transcranial direct current stimulation. And this is an area that's very, again, hot in the press with individuals reporting themselves to be doing this at home with home-built devices. And we see these sorts of issues as relating to some of the goals of the center, promoting understanding more broadly in the community about the importance of doing this under very well managed and understood procedures and policies. So the center ran a forum in Melbourne called Zap My Brain, and we had a couple of hundred people, public who turned up, and we're going to run this again in Brisbane later this year to sort of help promote the need to understand the consequences and implications of these new brain technologies. OK, so I'm going to move on and just briefly summarize the session, the symposium outline. This morning we're going to have four presentations which give you an insight into some of the details of these research questions that are being pursued in the center. Nicholas Price at Monash University, who is an associate investigator in the center, Marta de Guerrero at the University of Queensland, who is a chief investigator, and Peter Robinson, who I mentioned, and Michael Libbertson. This represents a view, if you like, of the current status of the center's research. And then, in fact, we're going to break slightly early for coffee at 10 o'clock, and then Michael's talk will be from 1030 after we've had the coffee break. And then after the break, we're going to move on and start looking at some of these key program areas that the INCF has been supporting. This is a slide I borrowed from Linda, I believe, if I remember correctly, someone at the INCF. And it highlights the importance for having in the neuroimaging and data sharing space well-developed formats, for example, and policies around how to share data and how to make data sets interoperable. So this is the topic of the second session. Jean-Baptiste Palloyne is going to speak to us about the NIDASH, and then we'll have a number of Australian speakers, Olivia Salvato from CSIRO and Brisbane, David Abbott from the Florian, Melbourne, and Panesh Ranega from Monash University around aspects of managing and sharing neuroimaging data. Then we'll break, and after lunch, we'll come back and start looking at some of the exciting opportunities that are evolving with new technologies in the visualization areas. And these are some of the data sets that we've collected at Monash Biomedical Imaging in perfusion and diffusion imaging. And we'll have a session then chaired by Paul Bonington, who's the director of the Monash E Research Center, which will discuss how these types of data are both computed, analyzed, as well as being simulated and visualized within technologies that are incredibly exciting. So Paul's chairing a session with Thomas Lippert speaking, Wojtek Steffen-Ellman from EPFL in Switzerland, and Paul will also then summarize the session with a presentation around the Monash cave facility. And then the last session today looks at the ATLAS' work program from the INCF and Jan Bialy, the chairman of the INCF, will chair this session to look at the current recent developments. And we'll have presentations from Yang Li at the Ulland Brain Institute, Andrew Yankee from Queensland University and Daniel Wojtek from Warsaw, from the Polish INCF node, to look at the current developments and next needs within the neuro-Atlasing program and community for INCF. So I'm really delighted we're here, and I think this is going to be a very interesting day. I'm looking forward to hearing all the presentations, and I'd now like to invite Nick Price to come up and give us the presentation for the morning.