Together with Sanu Ann Abraham I participated in the annual INCF Congress that took place at University of Warsaw in Warsaw, Poland. We both had poster demonstrations during the first day of the conference. Sanu Ann was presenting ReproSchema and Library: A JSON-LD schema to harmonize behavioral, cognitive, and neuropsych assessments and I was presenting Nipype 2.0: A new Python-based ecosystem for neuroscientific workflows and reproducibility.

I had many discussions about the future of the Nipype project and the new engine - Pydra. Most of the people visiting my demo were young scientists from Poland, who expressed their interest in collaborating on Pydra (and open source projects in general). Some of them, especially team from the Math Cognition Lab, Nicolaus Copernicus University (Torun, Poland) are already using Nipype and fMRIPrep in their project. I also met several people from the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology (Warsaw, Poland), and I had a chance to visit their Laboratory of Brain Imaging.

In addition to the discussion about Nipype, I’ve received many questions about the best practices in analyzing the neuroimaging data and data sharing. Most people where interested in sharing, but they had various concerns regarding the privacy and the regulations, in particular the EU General Data Protection Regulation. Not being able to receive clear answers is a big factor when making decision to not share the data.

Before the main conference we also had a Special Interest Group meeting of the Neuroimaging Data Model (NIDM) group, that was led by Dave Keator. We had several discussions on the project, especially on the Datalad future and the JSON-LD report format.