 the Nour Enfomatics 2015. And especially welcome to this lovely city of Cairns which turns out this is a very appropriate place for us to meet as a small but determined band of Nour Enfomatics pioneers. Because Cairns actually has a long history of pioneering and I think this is the history that we can draw some inspiration from. If you compare with me I'll try to yn ymgyrchu. Felly, yn ymgyrchu'r lland, yna yw ddweud y ffresbyryd. Yn ymgyrch, ychydigau amser yn ymgyrch ar y terfodol, a yna ym 1770, ym Ym James Kirk, ym Ym Ym Ym Gwlad HM, yw'r lland i'r lland i'r lland. Yn ymgyrch, yw'r lland i'r lland i'r lland i'r lland i'r lland i'r lland i'r lland i'r lland i'r lland i'r lland i'r lland i'r lland i'r lland i'r lland. Yn ymgyrch, yw'r lland i'r lland i'r lland i e accomplid, dancesu, j которra attendabe ac bar 커� singingg peria sydd wedi ici, er maint hyd tro gyda angen a'n dir likenia. Ynchydigau poddur ac yn gweld â wasihio ac yn d cellphoneag. Mae'n 것gi i mi, yr ysg Islam. Fel o bled fizseührt, y hyffordd, ym nid ym ustedes. Ond ddy, there was a peak of publicity when in 1872 gold was discovered in the Palmer River. So, this resulted of course in a gold rush and hundreds of thousands of fortune hunters coming to this region and it gradually became developed. But the area remains an uninhabitable swamp for a long period only inhabited by toughest pioneers, something to we might refer to as having barriers to wide spread use and then there was an investment in infrastructure so in 1886 they began to build the railway and this really secured Cairns future as a city but this engineering feat was not easy they had some really steep inclines to navigate so this building this infrastructure was really tough but the railway allowed access to some rich agricultural lands which sustained the pioneers after the decline of gold but still what we see is that really this area is only for the what we might call now the early adopters it's still remained fairly low-key but then at some point in time after World War II a critical mass of people arrived as tourism arrived in the area and becoming what is now Cairns major industry within 1984 an international airport opening and shortly following that then the world began to recognize the value of this area and in the 1980s the now famous barrier reef and the Daintree Park were named World Heritage sites so you might be able to see sort of where I'm going with this by now I think this can we can draw some inspiration for the field of neuroinformatics that probably you know in the early days we had some free spirited software hackers probably in the neuroinformatics field developing a few things here and there and then at some point the field was actually named and in 2005 the INCF was formed but true to say probably that the field in the early days was really only for the tough committed early pioneers and then maybe at some point in time we get some widespread publicity in arguably this could be where we are at now with the emergence of the large scale brain initiatives drawing a lot of publicity to neuroscience and they have a mandate to integrate and share their data so this is really giving putting a spotlight on neuroinformatics but we could say arguably that this is still there's still some some significant barriers to widespread use of a lot of the neuroinformatics tools so what they did in Cairns of course was invest in infrastructure and this is something that we've seen in neuroinformatics there's been many attempts to develop large scale infrastructures the INCF data space is one example of a federated data sharing platform but as with the railway I think it's true that a lot of these things have been really difficult to build and sustain so maybe we're still at this point where we're really looking at only the early adopters but if we can draw the inspiration from Cairns and keep going we see that at some point then a critical mass of people begins to use neuroinformatics tools in mainstream neuroscience and then the world recognises its value so I leave it to you to determine at which point we might be along this pathway and for sure what is needed now of course in all fields of science is a very pioneering spirit as we attempt to navigate what's been termed the data deluge is a huge amount of data being generated in scientific fields generally and in neuroscience I think we have a very particularly difficult problem of course as most of you you are aware you know we have investigation at all of these different scales of neuroscience information so we have investigators focused at the sub cellular level of cellular all the way through to tissue to regional whole brain and beyond into the clinical realm and then if we look at even any one particular scale we have investigators in different sub-domains all collecting different types of data and even if we drill into any one particular sub-domain we often see a very much a lack of standardisation of data formats even within a particular sub-domain and of course as we all know it takes a lot more resources to curate and integrate data properly than it does to generate more data and as scientists we're often more incentivised to just go out and generate more and more data and keep publishing than we are to put our resources into curating and integrating that data but what is really needed to ask the big questions about the brain the things that the questions like well what is it that causes Alzheimer's disease how do we cure Parkinson's disease or just what is it that makes you better at face recognition than me what we need to do then is to be able to integrate that data across all of those scales and that is really essential if we're ever to get a true understanding of the brain and ask those big questions and that's what we're all about in the field of neuro informatics of course and that's why we're here so what we're trying to do then is transform neuroscience into a data intensive e-science and this is absolutely essential if we're going to be able to replicate experiments to be able to visualise and integrate data to search through those integrated data and share them with one another so that ultimately we can model the brain and produce simulations of it and really understand what is going on in the brain so even a decade ago now the the Global Science Forum of the OECD were really quite visionary at that time in in recognising the need for a concerted international effort to develop neuro informatics and they formed INCF initially with with eight member countries this has now grown to 18 members with our latest member Malaysia joining us earlier this year we currently have the Victoria province of Australia as a member and we very much look forward to welcoming the whole of Australia as a member from the 1st of January next year so over the past decade then INCF has been operating four scientific programs in these areas shown and thanks to the coordinated efforts of more than 200 scientists over this period these programs have produced a number of products tools services standards and guidelines as well as many publications and from this point in time the the programs will now transition into a slight a new format which I'll talk about in a moment but this is a very particularly special point in time right now I think for neuro informatics this is a time where we're seeing increased prominence of of the field certainly now if you go to the major neuroscience meetings there there are a number of talks that refer to to neuro informatics and this is partly because of the drivers shown here so we have for example the the emergence of the large-scale brain initiatives in the US Europe Japan China Australia and elsewhere and as I said these have a mandate to integrate and share their data so they're really seeking international coordination of standards so that each country is able to to coordinate with with standards that are developing in other countries and they're looking for a coordinator of those standards and really looking for help from INCF and doing that so this is a a role that INCF has been embracing in the last couple of years and will continue to do the other major driver is the fact that it's really recognized now that the majority of scientific research is not reproducible so this is a serious situation and there's a call for change from funders they they want to maximize their investment also and encourage data sharing so they're not paying for many times over for different investigators to to collect essentially the the same data so they're seeking methods for practical and efficient sharing of data there's also right now very large political and societal demand for treatments for brain disease for example it's predicted that of all the neurological fields the cost for the field of dementia alone will surpass the cost of the entire field of oncology and this is a particular concern as we have a very rapidly aging world population right now and in fact in 2015 this is the first year that the number of people on the planet age 60 to 64 has surpassed those age 20 to 24 so this is a significant turning point in in time right now it's also increasingly recognized that the published paper is really insufficient legacy of research so we all know that from the point you collect your data and all the various analysis you do upon it and you get the results what you actually publish in your paper at the end is a huge abstraction of all the processes that that you went through so to truly understand that piece of research what you need is to be able to access the data but not only the data the the metadata and the provenance of the data so what happened to the data at all all of those stages and that's really essential so as I said we're at this special point in time with these these big drivers for the field of neuroinformatics and and also for INCF this is a significant point in time because we're now at the end of our second phase of operation and about to launch our third phase starting next year we have recently published a new strategic plan that's copies are available on the INCF booth outside and also from the INCF web portal and really in our third phase INCF is all about the better engaging and integrating with the mainstream neuroscience and leveraging our international network of expertise community training of funding in support of neuroscience use cases and really adding value to neuroscience. Our governing board have identified the field of dementia as a strategic flagship for our next phase and this is because of the sheer impact predicted of this disease the numbers of people affected as shown here global cost already well over 600 billion US dollars a year and really rising rapidly partly due to this transition in the composition of the population in the world everywhere becoming an older structure so this really is of significant concern to our member countries and next month the INCF will partner with OECD and have a workshop on promoting data sharing in dementia research that the web address is given there. So then I mentioned that our programs will be transitioning to a new structure in our third phase and this structure really intends to have a much broader engagement of community we will be operating community driven special interest groups so I encourage people from next year to engage with those special interest groups engage with others in in your community and what we would expect to do through the operation of these groups we imagine that the projects collaborative projects will emerge INCF will assist with community expertise and funding matchmaking and we're also going to be allocating seed funding to proposals that emerges having strong community support and that are within INCF strategic action areas and that that's really address a real world neuroscience use case. Training and education is of particular importance to INCF in its third phase and what we're seeing now and I think we will see even more so over the next five years is an emerging demand worldwide for the integration of neuroinformatics in neuroscience education and this leads to really a significant need to to train neuroscience education providers in neuroinformatics techniques and what we're aiming to do INCF is help coordinate a hub of educational resources for neuroinformatics education and this really will be very much a community effort to build this hub to gather curricular and content integrate existing resources there's a lot of things already out there and really encourage new creation so the idea would be then that somebody could come to this hub and download sample curricular multimedia content to enable them to deliver lectures sample data sets for tutorials and so on. So I'd encourage people to keep watch on the INCF portal INCF.org for the developments as we move towards the launch of the third phase next year and the portal itself will be relaunched next year also. We have a community mailing list that we encourage dialogue within the community through that list. You can also subscribe to our quarterly newsletter and I would encourage people to look out for the INCF YouTube channel which contains a lot of useful training resources already such as videos of lectures from our introduction to neuroinformatics training course. We'll also be at SFN in Chicago this year in October. The INCF booth will have a number of neuroinformatics demos and also a feature about the neuro data without borders initiative. I'd like to announce that the neuro informatics congress next year will take place in in Reading in the UK. This is just outside of London a very easy commute from all of the major London airports and also a nice commuter hub for many of the very scenic and historic parts of the UK. A really terrific program is is starting to form under the the chairmanship of Alan Evans so we look forward to seeing you in the UK next year. But returning to to this year's Congress if you haven't already found it on the the Congress website there's a section about abstracts and there's many different ways that you can view the abstracts from this meeting. A couple of announcements about small changes to what you have in the information you have in your program book. The demos are not taking place upstairs they're actually on this level in the Tully rooms which is just as you come out here the rooms on the right. Upstairs on on level one there is an open room for any of you to use for for meetings or to meet and do do hacking and that's in the blue water room and at the end of the day today when we have the poster reception the there will be drinks and canapes available for for two hours. If you've got any questions during the meeting all of the the INCF secretariat staff are all wearing this this black t-shirt so you can look out for them and they'll be happy to help you and of course we have our booth outside also if you have any questions. So at this point then I'd like to especially thank the the program committee led by by Catherine I know you've done a lot of work this year to make this a successful meeting so thank you very much for that and also thanks to Gary and the local organising committee from the Centre of Excellence for Integrative Brain function which is funded by the Australian Research Council so thanks to both the the program and the local organising committees. So then in the spirit of pioneering I'd just like to leave you with this quote from Emerson which says do not go where the path may lead go instead where there is no path and lead a trail so wish you a very enjoyable neuroinformatics 2015