Activities

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2013

July 28 - August 24, 2013
NEST is one of the software packages used for the student projects at the Advanced Course in Computational Neuroscience 2013 in Będlewo, Poland. Sacha van Albada participates as a tutor.
July 13-18, 2013
The NEST Inititive holds a tutorial on "Developing neuron and synapse models for NEST" (Abigail Morrison, Jochen Eppler) at CNS*13 in Paris and gives a demonstration of the visualization of simulated brain activity by virtual reality methods (Christian Nowke and Jochen Eppler). In addition, members of the NEST Initiative are actively participating with a tutorial on the "Theory of correlation transfer and correlation structure in recurrent networks" (Moritz Helias) and several poster contributions.
June 19th
Markus Diesmann speaks at ISC'13, Leipzig, Germany, about "Simulation Technology for Brain-Scale Neuronal Networks".
June 17 - July 4, 2013
NEST is one of the software packages used for the student projects at the Okinawa Computational Neuroscience Course 2013. Pierre Yger participates as a tutor.
April 4, 2013
Members of the NEST Initiative publish in PLoS Computational Biology a study on neuronal correlation transfer using NEST technology for high-precision simulations where spikes are represented in continuous time.
March 19, 2013
The article Helias M., Tetzlaff T. & Diesmann M., Echoes in correlated neural systems, New Journal of Physics 15(2):023002 (see February 1, 2013) has been selected for inclusion in IOPselect, a special collection of journal articles with "Substantial advances or significant breakthroughs", "A high degree of novelty" and "Significant impact on future research".
March 18 – 20, 2013
Members of the NEST Inititative present neuroscientific work produced with NEST as well as NEST technology at the BCCN Freiburg Conference "Dynamics of neuronal systems".
March 14, 2013
In an editorial of "Neuroinformatics", Erik De Schutter comments positively on the development process of NEST and the perspectives of the Human Brain Project [1].
March 13-16, 2013
Members of the NEST Inititative present neuroscientific work produced with NEST as well as NEST technology at the 10th Göttingen Meeting of the German Neuroscience Society (NWG). See [2] for the full program.
March 4th, 2013
Abigail Morrison and Markus Diesmann contribute talks at COSYNE 2013 to the workshop "Large-scale neuronal simulations - science, languages and platforms" on "Relating structure and activity in a full-scale local cortical network model" (MD) and "Scaling up neuronal simulations with NEST" (AM).
March 3rd, 2013
Markus Diesmann describes the history of the co-development of NEST for the K supercomputer in Kobe in volume 8 of the Bio Supercomputing Newsletter.
February 1, 2013
Moritz Helias, Tom Tetzlaff and Markus Diesmann publish an article on the structure of spike-train correlation functions in finite-size neural networks in the New Journal of Physics. By means of an analytically solvable model, the authors show, in particular, how the size of a spiking neural network can be scaled without changing its dynamical state. NEST simulations are used to demonstrate the validity of the mathematical framework.
January 28, 2013
The EU commission awards one of two EU Flagship grants to the Human Brain Project (HBP). NEST experts have already contributed to the HBP preparatory study demonstrating the feasibility of this project and in the coming 10 years are planning to advance simulation technology towards brain-scale simulations on next-generation supercomputers.
January 28, 2013
Gewaltig & Diesmann (2007), NEST (NEural Simulation Tool), Scholarpedia, 2(4):1430 is the top-cited Scholarpedia article (186 citations).
January 14-15, 2013
The newly established Simulation Laboratory Neuroscience (SLNS) at the Research Center Jülich is introduced to the scientific community (see [3]).
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2012

December 27, 2012
Rembrandt Bakker, Thomas Wachtler and Markus Diesmann publish a perspectives article on "CoCoMac 2.0 and the future of tract-tracing databases" in Frontiers in Neuroinformatics.
December 21, 2012
NEST Initiative releases NEST 2.2.0 under GPLv2+, a new version of NEST containing substantial improvements and many new features.
December 4th, 2012
Markus Diesmann gives a lecture on "Brain-scale neuronal network simulations on K" at the 4th Biosupercomputing Symposium in Tokyo.
December 1st, 2012
The current Bernstein newsletter with a focus on collaborations with industry partners reports in [ http://www.nncn.uni-freiburg.de/pdfs/newsletter0412en "Networking with NEST"] (page 4-5) on the long-standing relationship of the NEST Initiative with the Bernstein Network highlighting the work of Dr. Marc-Oliver Gewaltig.
October 16, 2012
"NEST goes GPL": The NEST Initiative presents itself and the NEST 2.0.0 release under the GNU General Public License at the INCF booth at the Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting in New Orleans (afternoon; see demo abstract) and at the Computational Neuroscience Social (6:45 PM-8:45 PM at Hilton Riverside: Versailles, New Orleans).
October 12, 2012
The first results which show the performance of NEST on the K supercomputer are now published [4]. The provisional pdf is already available online.
September 20, 2012
Deger et al. publish an article in PLoS Computational Biology describing how cooperative synapse formation and elimination explains synapse distributions in cortex. The study analyses a simplified version of the structural-plasticity model [Helias et al., 2008] implemented in NEST. Press releases are featured by the University Freiburg (english, german) and the Bernstein Center Freiburg (english, german).
September 7, 2012
Marc-Oliver Gewaltig held a tutorial on "Workflows for Modeling and Simulation" at the INCF Short Course in Neuroinformatics in Munich
August 2, 2012
Tetzlaff et al. publish an article in PLoS Computational Biology showing that uncorrelated activity in spiking neural networks is a general feature occuring in dynamical systems with negative feedback and can be fully explained by a linear theory. The analytical predictions of this theory are in excellent quantitative agreement with the results of network simulations performed in NEST. The study underlines the problems occuring when feedback connections are replaced by feedforward input, thereby emphasizing the importance of large-scale (full-system) simulations.
July 21, 2012
Ruben Moreno-Bote and Moritz Helias hold a tutorial at CNS*12 in Decatur/Atlanta on the Theory of correlation transfer and correlation structure in recurrent networks. In the context of the tutorial, Moritz Helias explains how binary networks can be simulated with NEST. This enables verification of theoretical results on binary networks by direct simulation.
July 11, 2012
Bernstein TV (Bernstein Network Computational Neuroscience) launches two NEST movies "NEST::documented" and "NEST - A brain simulator" (german versions: "NEST::documented", "NEST - Ein Hirnsimulator).
July 8, 2012
The online magazin Telepolis (Heise) publishes an interview (german) with Markus Diesmann on brain simulation, the human brain project, the future of supercomputers and communication problems between journalists and scientists.
July 30-August 24, 2012
NEST is one of the software packages used for student projects at the Advanced Course in Computational Neuroscience 2012 in Będlewo, Poland. NEST expert Birgit Kriener participates as a tutor.
June 11-29, 2012
Markus Diesmann lectures at the Okinawa Computational Neuroscience Course 2012. NEST is one of the software packages used for student projects. Moritz Deger participates as NEST tutor.
February, 2012
The paper by Lindén et al. (2011) is commented on in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, and evaluated as a "Must Read" [8] in Faculty-of-1000 Biology.
January 17, 2012
An article in systembiologie.de describes the new institute INM-6 at Jülich Research Center (in German).
January 15- February 10, 2012
Tom Tetzlaff lectures at the 4th Latin American School on Computational Neuroscience (LASCON IV) at the University of Sao Paulo, Ribeirao Preto, Brazil. NEST is one of the software packages used for student projects. Tom Tetzlaff works as NEST tutor.
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2011

December 12, 2011
Lindén et al. publish a manuscript on the spatial reach of the local-field potential (LFP) in the journal Neuron. In this study, NEST simulations of a cortical network model contribute realistic layer-specific synaptic input to the LFP model. Press releases (English, German) are featured by the Jülich Aachen Research Alliance (JARA) and the Research Center Jülich.
November 24-25, 2011
Jochen Martin Eppler from the NEST Initiative, Mikael Djurfeldt, creator of MUSIC and CSA, and Andrew Davison, creator of PyNN, meet in Gif sur Yvette for a hackathon to design and implement a native CSA interface for the NEST backend of PyNN and to discuss the future of the MUSIC interface for NEST.
October 2011
The web site of the Next-Generation Integrated Simulation of Living Matter (ISLIM) project links to NEST as one of the official simulation codes. Because of its performance NEST was selected a first runner on the K supercomputer.
October 27-28, 2011
Manchester-Jülich - EU BrainScaleS and IAS Workshop "What can Neuromorphic Computing and HPC learn from each other?" at the Research Center Jülich
October 4th, 2011
A publication by Yamauchi, Kim and Shinomoto extends the MAT neuron model by a voltage dependence of the threshold so that the model exhibits the full range of responses to transient currents. The paper shows that the model is "essentially linear" (Morrison et al. 2008) and can efficiently be implemented using technology developed by the NEST Initiative (Morrison et al. 2007, Rotter and Diesmann 1999).
September 20-21, 2011
Members of the NEST Initiative co-organize and attend the workshop "Creating, Documenting & Sharing Network Models" in Edinburgh.
September 19 - 30, 2011
NEST is the simulator used for practical activities at Simulation of Biological Neural Networks course at Bernstein Center Freiburg taught by NEST expert Prof. Abigail Morrison.
August 12, 2011
An independent publication on state of the art integration methods for spiking neuronal networks lists only NEST as a software package achieving the accuracy of the reference solution and points out the importance of handling spikes in continuous time (Henker et al. 2011 J Comput Neurosci doi:10.1007/s10827-011-0353-9). The detailed algorithm implemented in NEST has been published in Hanuschkin, Kunkel et al. 2010 Front Neuroinf 4:113. The latest version of PyNN provides an interface for enabling continuous spike interaction if provided by the simulation engine.
August 1 - 26, 2011
NEST is one of the software packages used for the student projects at the 16th Advanced Course in Computational Neuroscience. This year NEST expert Moritz Deger will serve as a tutor.
July 23 - 28, 2011
Several projects involving NEST are presented at the CNS 2011 in Stockholm (see [5],[6],[7]).
June 21, 2011
NEST goes climate science. Anne Chapuis and Tom Tetzlaff (Norwegian University of Life Sciences) study the dynamics of glacier calving using NEST as a simulation tool. The work is presented by Tom Tetzlaff at the Biannual Meeting of the Norwegian Physical Society 2011. In an interview published by the largest Norwegian online science journal forskning.no, Anne Chapuis and Tom Tetzlaff talk about their project (in Norwegian).
June 13 - 30, 2011
NEST is one of the software packages used for the student projects at the Okinawa Computational Neuroscience Course 2011. This year NEST expert Dr. Jan Moren will serve as a tutor.
June 2011
USB-stick machine making NEST sticks at Forschungszentrum Jülich.
USB-stick machine making NEST sticks at Forschungszentrum Jülich.
Dr. Jochen Martin Eppler automates mass creation of NEST USB-sticks at Forschungszentrum Jülich.
June 9th, 2011
The front page of Jülich Aachen Research Alliance (JARA) features the interview with Marcus Diesmann "Von Tokio nach Jülich: Prof. Markus Diesmann simuliert mit mathematischen Modellen Hirnaktivität" ("From Tokyo to Jülich: Prof. Markus Diesmann simulates brain activity with mathematical models," in German).
May - September, 2011
NEST is a participating project in this year's Google Summer of Code to deploy Continuous Integration infrastructure improving on the existing development practices (implemented by Yury V. Zaytsev and mentored by Prof. Abigail Morrison).
Spring Semester 2011
Large-Scale Neural Modeling class at Stanford University given by Dr. Kwabena Boahen and assisted by Peiran Gao used NEST for modeling exercises.
March 17th, 2011
The front page of Frontiers features the invited focused review by Helias et al. on "Finite post synaptic potentials cause a fast neuronal response".
February 7th, 2011
An invited focused review article "Finite post synaptic potentials cause a fast neuronal response" by Dr. Moritz Helias and colleagues was accepted for publication in Frontiers in Neuroscience. The article reviews recent progress in the theory of integrate-and-fire models in the presence of finite post synaptic potentials. The mathematical insights are illustrated using the analogy of the shishi odoshi. Section 6.2 discusses the importance of reliable simulation technology.
January 24, 2011
NEST enabled research results were presented at a ceremony at the National Art Center Tokyo to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the treaty of friendship between Japan and Prussia organized by the German embassy. The event took place in the presence of the crown prince Naruhito of Japan, the vice foreign minister of Japan Matsumoto, and the German embassador Dr. Stanzel (more at DAAD news). As the result of a competitive selection process the study "What Japanese gardens teach us about neural dynamics" by Dr. Helias and co-workers was presented to the crown prince as one out of only two. A more detailed report on the latter work was just published in Frontiers in Neuroscience.
January 2011
An article about visualization of simulation results on JUGENE supercomputer in Jülich: "Visualizing Spiking Neurons in Virtual Reality".
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2010

November 14-15, 2010
NEST 2.0 is demonstrated during the SfN Annual Meeting in San Diego at the booth of the INCF (see below). The demonstration will take place on Nov. 15 from 9:30 to 12:30 in booth #4025 which will be in the Non-profit area of the exhibits. The full program of demos at the INCF booth can be downloaded at [8]. In addition, there is a NEST Poster in the scientific program on Sunday, November 14 from 11:00-12:00 in Halls B-H, 208.28/MMM19 and one at the Computational Neuroscience Social on Tuesday, November 16 from 6:45 pm-8:45 pm.
November 12, 2010
A paper about the FACETS Demonstrater has been submitted to Biological Cybernetics. A citable preprint is available at arXiv.org.
November 11, 2010
The first release candidate of NEST 2.0 is available including technology described in 4 recently published papers. See the release notes.
November 3, 2010
The manuscript "PyNN: a common interface for neuronal network simulators" has made it into the top 25 of most cited Frontiers articles since its original publishing date back in January 2009.
November 3, 2010
The manuscript "PyNEST: a convenient interface to the NEST simulator" has made it into the top 25 of most cited Frontiers articles since its original publishing date back in January 2009.
September 9, 2010
A manuscript reporting the first neuroscientific discovery with NEST only possible with the technology to simulate spike interactions in continuous time has been published at PLoS Computational Biology. The authors observe a previously overlooked instantaneous non-linear response of the integrate-and-fire neuron. Press-releases are available on the RIKEN BSI and the RIKEN (English and Japanese) as well as on the University Freiburg (English and German), the Bernstein Network Computational Neuroscience and the Bernstein Center Freiburg web site. Some resulting press coverage can be found here.
September 2 - 4, 2010
NEST related poster contributions at Neuro2010 in Kobe, Japan
August 30 - September 1, 2010
Poster contributions describe the current state of NEST at the INCF congress in Kobe, Japan
August 2 - 27, 2010
NEST is one of the software packages used for the student projects at the 15th Advanced Course in Computational Neuroscience
July 24 - 30, 2010
At the CNS*2010 conference neuroscientific results obtained with NEST will be presented in one featured oral contribution and one short oral contribution: Chris Trengove, Cees van Leeuwen, Markus Diesmann "High storage capacity of synfire chains in large-scale cortical networks of conductance-based spiking neurons."; Tom Tetzlaff, Moritz Helias, Gaute Einevoll, Markus Diesmann "Decorrelation of low-frequency neural activity by inhibitory feedback."
June 14 - July 1
NEST is one of the software packages to be used for the student projects at the Okinawa Computational Neuroscience Course 2010. This year two NEST experts will serve as tutors: Wiebke Potjans (plasticity and neuromodulators) and Tobias Potjans (structured networks).
April 29, 2010
The article "The mechanism of synchronization in feed-forward neuronal networks" by Sven Goedeke and Markus Diesmann (2008) New Journal of Physics doi: 10.1088/1367-2630/10/1/015007 has be downloaded over 720 times. The impact factor of this journal is now 3.44.
April 21, 2010
The Junior Professorship Programme of Baden-Wuerttemberg supports Prof. Abigail Morrison's research on the neuronal basis of movement control. All simulations are carried out with NEST. press release
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2009

November 16, 2009
NEST release 1.9.8401-2 contains an implementation of the award winning MAT2 neuron model by Kobayashi R, Tsubo Y, and Shinomoto S (2009) Front. Comput. Neurosci. 3:9 doi:10.3389/neuro.10.009.2009. Using this model, Dr. Kobayashi (Ritsumeikan University) won the 1st prizes for Challenges A and B of the INCF Quantitative Single-Neuron Modeling Competition 2009 awarded at the 2nd INCF Congress in Pilsen, Czech Republic.
November 13, 2009
A manuscript reporting the first neuroscientific discovery with NEST only possible with the technology to simulate spike interactions in continuous time has been uploaded to ArXiv. The authors observe a previously overlooked instantaneous non-linear response of the integrate-and-fire neuron.
October 7-9, 2009
FACETS CodeJam Workshop #3
organized by Abigail Morrison and Bernd Wiebelt with Eilif Muller and Andrew Davison
September 6 - 8, 2009
Dr. Markus Diesmann is an invited speaker at the workshop "High performance computing and grid infrastructure for neuroinformatics applications" at the 2nd INCF Congress of Neuroinformatics
August 3 - 28, 2009
NEST is one of the software packages to be used for the student projects at the 14th Advanced Course in Computational Neuroscience
Tutoring by Moritz Helias
July 22 - 23, 2009
Jochen Martin Eppler presents the NEST-Python integration in a workshop on "Python in Neuroscience" at the 18th Annual Computational Neuroscience Meeting CNS*2009
July 18, 2009
"Large-Scale Neuronal Network Models: Principles and Practice," a Bernstein-Tutorial at the CNS*2009 meeting by Dr. Hans Ekkehard Plesser
June 18, 2009
Dr. Marc-Oliver Gewaltig gives a NEST tutorial at the Okinawa Computational Neuroscience Course 2009
June 15 - July 2, 2009
NEST is one of the software packages to be used for the student projects at the Okinawa Computational Neuroscience Course 2009
Tutoring by Birgit Kriener
May 25 - 28, 2009
Dr. Marc-Oliver Gewaltig is an invited speaker at the 3rd Workshop on Detailed Modelling and Simulation of Signal Processing in Neurons
April 6, 2009
Dr. Hans Ekkehard Plesser gives an invited talk entitled "Simulating Neuronal Networks: It is easy to do---but do we know what we are doing?" at the University of Oldenburg, Germany
March 27 - 28, 2009
NEST related poster contributions to the 8th Göttingen Meeting of the German Neuroscience Society: T25-10A, T26-2B, -5B, -6B, -7B, -13B, -1C, -3C, -4C, -7C
March 19 - 21, 2009
Members of the NEST Initiative actively particpate in the INCF activity on Standards and Guidelines for Large-Scale Modeling
1st meeting of the task force held in Tokyo, Japan
March 17, 2009
Dr. Hans Ekkehard Plesser gives an invited talk on "Simulating Layered Neuronal Networks with PyNEST" at the University of Tsukuba, Japan
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2008

November 15 - 19, 2008
NEST poster and demo at the INCF booth at the 38th annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience
Some conference contributions using the NEST simulator: 16.1, 326.16/C7, 220.1, 694.1/UU62
September 7 - 9, 2008
Live demonstration of NEST at the 1st INCF Congress of Neuroinformatics
NEST related poster contributions: 14, 46, 83, 87
August 5, 2008
NEST tutorial by Dr. Marc-Oliver Gewaltig at the 13th Advanced Course in Computational Neuroscience
August 4 - 29, 2008
NEST is one of the software packages to be used for the student projects at the 13th Advanced Course in Computational Neuroscience
Tutoring by Moritz Helias
July 19 - 24, 2008
NEST related poster contributions to the 17th Annual Computational Neuroscience Meeting CNS*2008: P60, P69, P131
NEST developers, Alexander Hanuschkin and Susanne Kunkel, receive an award for one of the best poster contributions
June 19, 2009
"Simulating large neural networks with the Neural Simulation Tool NEST", a lecture by Dr. Marc-Oliver Gewaltig at the Okinawa Computational Neuroscience Course 2008
June 16 - July 3, 2008
NEST is one of the software packages to be used for the student projects at the Okinawa Computational Neuroscience Course 2008
Tutoring by Birgit Kriener and Tom Tetzlaff
[edit]

2007

December 2007
NEST Poster at the INCF booth at the Society for Neuroscience Meeting 2007 in San Diego.
August 2007 
NEST tutorial at the FIAS Neuroschool 2007 NEST is one of the software packages to be used for the student projects.
August 2007 
NEST tutorial at the EU Advanced Course in Computational Neuroscience in Arcachon, France. NEST is one of the software packages to be used for the student projects.
July 2007 
NEST initiative participates in the workshop "Availability of published computational models for testing and attributed reuse" at the Computational Neuroscience, CNS*07 conference.
June 2007 
NEST is used in the FACETS course "Modelling for beginners" in Stockholm.
June 2007 
NEST technology is discussed in a tutorial on "Differential equations and numerics for large spiking neural networks" at the Okinawa Computational Neuroscience Course, OCNC 2007.
May 2007 
Paper on 'Spike-Timing-Dependent Plasticity in Balanced Random Networks' using NEST has been published in Neural Computation 2007; 19:1437-1467 A press release can be found here.
May 2007 
The NEST web-site moves to MediaWiki, the wikipedia platform.
April 2007 
NEST is discussed in a review on simulators, accepted for publication in JCNS.
April 2007 
Milestones and bug-tracking moves to trac platform http://trac.edgewall.org/.
April 2007 
Discussion on meta-simulator at FACETS CodeJam, Heidelberg.
02.04.2007 - 05.04.2007
Python interface for NEST completed at FACETS CodeJam, Heidelberg.
March 2007 
Scholarpedia article on NEST published.
February 2007 
Paper on 'Exact Subthreshold Integration with Continuous Spike Times in Discrete-Time Neural Network Simulations' using NEST published. Neural Computation. 2007;19:47-79
11.01.2007 - 13.01.2007 
HRI participates in FACETS meeting.
January 2007 
HRI introduced as an officially partner of FACETS.
[edit]

2006

December 2006 
Paper on "Programmable Logic Construction Kits for Hyper Real-time Neuronal Modeling" by Guerrero-Rivera R, Morrison A, Diesmann M, Pearce, TC (2006) (Neural Computation 18:2651--2679)
12.12.2006 - 13.12.2006 
NEST represented at 1st INCF workshop on large-scale modeling; resulting report is consistent with many ideas developed in the course of the research on NEST operations.
September 2006
Pre-release of NEST 2 available with distributed computing and STDP capabilities.
September 2006 
Diesmann reseach group moves to RIKEN BSI [9].
07.08.2006 - 01.09.2006 
NEST is one of the software packages that has been used in the advanced course in computational neuroscience in Arcachon, France.
31.07.2006 - 11.08.2006 
Introduction to NEST in the course "Simulation of biological neuronal networks" held at the BCCN in Freiburg.
16.07.2006 - 18.07.2006 
NEST workshop at CNS Conference in Edinburgh.
01.06.2006
Hathor cluster financed by BCCN fund goes into operation. Photos Hathor
25.05.2006 
Article describing technology for simulations with precise spike times accepted for publication by Neural Computation.
February 2006 
The website of the Black Forest Grid becomes operational.
[edit]

2005

November 2005 
A SUN V40z, 4 x Dual Core 2.2Ghz Opteron SMP system with 32GB memory arrives at the BCCN in Freiburg. The system's mission is:
  • explore the properties of complex cortical graphs
  • explore hybrid algorithms for large scale simulations combining message-passing with multi-threading to exploit modern computer architectures
Here are some photos of the hardware.
September 2005 
The EU funded FACETS project (Fast Analog Computing with Emergent Transient States) starts. NEST is one of the simulation tools used in this project.
01.08.2005 - 26.08.2005 
NEST is one of the simulation tools used at the Computational Neuroscience Summer School in Arcachon, France.
17.07.2005 - 21.07.2005 
Extended tutorial on NEST at the CNS*2005 Meeting in Madison, Wi.
15.05.2005 
The Freiburg based researchers of the NEST Initiative are among the founding members of the Black Forest Grid (also available in German ).
18.01.2005 - 28.01.2005 
Contribution to the Summer School on Advanced Scientific Computing in Alpine Heath Resort, Drakensberg, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.
[edit]

2004

August/September 2004 
Introduction of the Neuro Simulation Tool NEST at the Computational Neuroscience Summer School in Obidos, Portugal.
February 2004 
Course Simulation of Biological Neural Networks at the University of Freiburg
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