The ninth international workshop on Statistical Analysis of Neural Data (SAND9) will take place May 21-23, 2019, in Pittsburgh, PA. Its purpose is to define important challenges in the analysis of neural data and useful strategies for attacking them. SAND9 will bring together neurophysiologists, statisticians, mathematicians, engineers, physicists, and computer scientists who are interested in quantitative analysis of neural data. The meeting will include 8 keynote lectures, with 5 invited discussants, 12 lectures by junior investigators chosen competitively based on abstract submissions, a poster session, and a panel discussion of emerging challenges across several areas of brain science. SAND9 is the ninth workshop in a series that began in 2002. The workshops are held during the spring at the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, run jointly by Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. Like past SAND meetings, SAND9 aims to foster communication between experimental neuroscientists and those trained in statistical and computational methods; to encourage young researchers to present their work and get feedback from more senior investigators; and to include as participants women, under-represented minorities, and persons with disabilities, who might benefit from the small workshop environment.
Experimental methods for discovering the neural basis of behavior have been advancing rapidly and, as a result, brain data sets are increasing in size and complexity. Methods for better understanding such rich data sets, which can enable design of ever-more informative experiments, are desperately needed. This workshop series is concerned with identifying, discussing, and disseminating many of the most promising approaches to analysis of neural data of all kinds, including data obtained from microscopy, electrophysiology, calcium imaging, circuit stimulation, and neuroimaging. More details are available at http://sand.stat.cmu.edu/
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