Welcome
NIH/NIDDK Bonsai Course 2018
This training course will introduce you to the basic concepts of the Bonsai visual programming language. By the end of the course you should know:
- How to use Bonsai to create data acquisition and processing pipelines
- How to create your own closed-loop behaviour systems
- How to specify a simple operant behavior task using states and events
- What is a Bonsai workflow and what it represents
- What is a marble diagram and how to read it
- What is an observable sequence
Course Schedule
| Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Morning | Acquisition and Tracking | Closed-loop and Operant Behavior | Final Projects | |
| Afternoon | Introduction to Bonsai | Advanced Concepts | Rapid-prototyping with Bonsai |
Rapid-prototyping Systems Neuroscience with Bonsai
The design of a modern systems neuroscience experiment demands the combination of multiple technologies for monitoring behavior and neural activity. The growing complexity on both the amount of neural data that is collected, and the naturalistic conditions under which behavior must be explored, place an increasing burden on the experimenter to become a jack of all trades. Furthermore, changing conditions often require experimental design to be iterated and tweaked multiple times.
In practice, however, time constraints, and the fear of breaking what is already working, tend to constrain technical development to the few things that the researcher could actually get to work, and these tend to freeze over time. In this talk, we will introduce how the structure of a systems programming language can prevent development freeze and liberate the experimenter to play and refine designs at every stage of the process.