Franco Pestilli

Works of art don’t just entertain, heal or console; they can also promote health, learning, and the development of more humane technologies. Moreover, advances in AI, brain-computer interfacing, and brain modeling enable the study of mechanisms by which the arts have an impact on brain activity and brain health. The panel will discuss challenges and clinical opportunities in advancing data standards, models and neurotechnology for advancing and personalizing arts-in-medicine and promote brain health.

This session examines strategies for achieving interoperability among data, data platforms, analysis pipelines, and modeling tools across major international brain initiatives. Each initiative brings unique strengths—such as the comprehensive EBAINS platform, the U.S. BRAIN Initiative data archives and brainlife.io platform, and the marmoset and human data and tools from Japan’s Brain/MINDS project. By integrating these complementary efforts, we aim to identify new opportunities to deepen our understanding of brain function and to accelerate translational research in clinical neuroscience. A key focus will be on how detailed circuit data and computational models derived from rodent, non-human and human primate research can inform large-scale brain models to better elucidate cognitive processes and neuropsychiatric disorders. The recent rapid advances in large language models (LLMs) and their interoperability via the Model Context Protocol (MCP) further open novel pathways for harmonizing diverse data formats, ontologies, species, biophysical scales, and geographic boundaries. In this session, speakers from Europe, the United States, Canada, and Japan will share their current initiatives and perspectives on promoting global data and tool interoperability, followed by an open discussion to brainstorm collaborative frameworks and future research directions.

The purpose of this session is to bring together the neuroscience research infrastructure providers to discuss the gaps, challenges, and opportunities for pooling resources and tap into each other's user base, thereby expanding the impact within the research community. The session will be divided into 3 discussion sessions. Each discussion session will be introduced by a specific repository who will introduce their service and the topic of the discussion session (i.e. gaps). Following the introduction, a panel of 5 speakers representing other infrastructures present will discuss the topic. Session 1: Gaps, moderated by JB Poline (NeuroBagel). Participants: Kenji Doya (Brain/MINDS), Florian Hutzler (Austrian NeuroCloud), Franco Pestilli (BrainLife). Session 2: Challenges, moderated by Maryann Martone (SPARC). Participants: Birgit Schaffhauser (MIP, HIP), Yaroslav Halchenko (DANDI Archive), Thomas Wachtler (G-Node). Session 3: Opportunities, moderated by Jan Bjaalie (EBRAINS). Participants: Cyril Pernet (Public Neuro), Petra Ritter (Health Data Cloud), Gard Thomassen (Services for Sensitive Data / TSD, University of Oslo)