The International Conference on NeuroProsthetic Devices (ICNPD) will bring together international investigators of all levels to Beijing, China in order to discuss recent research findings and to establish new collaborations in the new and exciting field of Neuroprosthetic Devices. The conference will take place on February 27-28, 2010, preceded by a six-week online discussion of issues that will be addressed at the conference. Main support for the conference is provided by two top research institutions in China, the Peking University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, as well as by the National Natural Science Foundation of China. NSF support will expand the participation of junior US researchers at the conference by subsidizing their travel costs and publication costs for their short papers in the special conference-dedicated issue of an open-access journal Frontiers in Neuroprosthetics.
The main conference theme will be the translation of the basic neuroscience and engineering research into clinical practice. There are multiple opportunities for the US and Chinese researchers to initiate collaborative projects in the development and testing of neuroprosthetic devices for multiple neurological disorders. At the conference there will be multiple discussion panels and poster sessions to stimulate the attendee interaction. The emphasis will be upon identifying the areas of possible collaborations and seeking to find the mechanism for jump-starting these collaborations, rather than simply to report on the research progress. Online resources will be created at the conclusion of the conference to highlight the successes in initiating the collaborations and to summarize the discussions which will take place during the conference.
This grant supported ten US researchers, at the early career level, to attend the Second International Conference on Neuroprosthetic Devices (ICNPD-2010) . This annual meeting took place February 27-28, 2010 in Beijing, China. The US attendies, from several colleges and universities across the nation, gave the talks, presented posters, and interacted with 80 other participants from six countries. The conference demonstrated the need and will of scientists throughout the world to combine their voices in discussing the existing challenges and future direction of the discipline, and particularly, the development of global standards in fabrication of and communication with the neuroprosthetic probes. One of the accomplishment of the ICNPD-2010 is the formation of an international Alliance for Innovations in Neural Prosthetics, which features many renown experts as its founding members. Another accomplishment is a publication of a special issue of the open-access journal Frontiers in Neuroscience with four full-text papers and an online publication (including the Digital Object Identifiers) of all conference abstracts at a searchable neuroscience-related depository, the Frontiers Conferences. Among the conference short papers, seventeen were submitted by the student authors. These papers were carefully reviewed by the conference scientific committee and students were given feedback to improve the papers prior to their publication. In addition, all the student papers were scored and the best student paper was identified. The winner, Mr. Seung Woo Lee from Seoul National University, has received the invitation and the $1000 travel assistance award to present a short talk at the prestigious Neural Interfaces Conference 2010 in Long Beach, CA, USA.
