NRSC courses

• Students will begin to learn or refresh their coding skills using the materials used in the Dynamic Brain Circuits "Intro to coding" sessions in Matlab, python or R.
• While developing their skills students will choose a coding project to work on using their thesis data, data from an open repository/publication or data previously collected at UBC. Projects could reproduce a figure/finding from a paper, illustrate a well-known result from open data, or answer a new scientific question.
• Students will work with instructors/tutors to determine a manageable scope for their project to help ensure that it can be completed in the time allotted, will not be limited by available computing resources and are clearly delineated into reading data, working with the data, and saving outputs/figures.
• Students will meet the instructor(s) in the classroom for guided intro to programming sessions with an additional 2 hours of tutoring support available through the online Databinge forum.
• Students should expect to spend a comparable amount of time working independently on their projects.
• For evaluation, students will provide a written report, code (well-documented Jupyter notebook, R markdown file, or matlab script), and a final presentation at the Databinge forum.

• Students will already be comfortable with programming in Matlab, python or R. Review of the materials used in the Dynamic Brain Circuits "Intro to coding" sessions is at their discretion.
• Students will choose a coding project to work on using their thesis data, data from an open repository/publication, or data previously collected at UBC.  Projects could reproduce a figure(s)/finding(s) from a paper, illustrate a well-known result(s) from open data, or answer a new scientific question(s).
• Students will work with instructors/tutors to determine a manageable scope for their project and will report to all in class sessions alongside 510A students.  This may include identifying additional computing resources, either in the NINC lab or using iMAP Compute Canada resources.
• Students will meet the instructor(s) in the classroom for project guidance with an additional 2 hours of tutoring support available through the online Databinge forum.
• Students should expect to spend a comparable amount of time (as scheduled in class time) working independently on their projects.
• For evaluation, students will provide a written report, code (well-documented Jupyter notebook, R markdown file, or matlab script), and a final presentation at the Databinge forum.

An opportunity for three advanced students (contact the coordinator for pre-approval before registration) to work with existing mouse visual system open data sets and new not publicly available data sets from the Allen Institute for Brain Science. This is expected to be a group data analysis project that will likely lead to a team paper. Inclusion within the team manuscript is dependent on overall contribution and input from other team members and it is expected that the data analysis (and contributions for a paper) may take longer than the course term. Assessment will be based on student’s understanding of the biology, software tools, and repositories they create during regular course period and attendance in weekly team meetings.  Attendance in NRSC510A/B lectures and tutorials will be optional for these students. Topics may include study of neural coding, cortical cellular mapping, “representational drift”, and computational modeling.