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Boston-NeuroTalks consolidates talk announcements of neuroscience and cognitive science in the greater Boston area. Its mission is to spread the latest neuroscientific discoveries faster and wider, expediting our understanding of the human brain.
Boston-NeuroTalks is the largest free service of the same kind and popularly accessed in the format of email and/or calendar. As of 2011, around 800 (cognitive) neuroscientists are using Boston-NeuroTalks.
Inspired by Boston-NeuroTalks, similar services are provided in other cities, such as Trieste area Cognitive Science and Neuroscience Talks.
In 2000, the Boston-NeuroTalks emailing list was founded as a Yahoo! Group to solve the problem that students often miss out on interesting talks not because they don't get the announcements, but because they don't realize their relevance. Therefore, the early version of Boston-NeuroTalks not only forwarded the time/place/title info, but also prefaced many of the notices with mini intros that briefly explained who the speaker was and why the talk might be interesting.
In 2007, an accompanied calendar service was founded to organize around 800 announcements sent out per year by Boston-NeuroTalks. In 2008, more than 1000 events (i.e. ~3 talks per day) with detailed abstracts were calendared. In 2009, Boston-NeuroTalks Calendar 2.0 implemented the idea of WikiCalendar on the Google platform. Users of Google Calendar can freely add/edit entries in the Boston-NeuroTalks calendar once the permission is passed down from other users.
To fundamentally solve the problems of information completeness and explosion in such a centralized database, the new Boston-NeuroTalks was created to leverage the power of both collective content creation (e.g., Wikipedia) and collective content filtering (e.g., Google and Amazon recommendations).
It also integrates email and calendar services together with a forum. Here email and calendar subscriptions can be made based on talk keywords and authors. Also, the social aspects of Boston-NeuroTalks 3.0 such as comments and ratings help to highlight important topics and speakers.
Over the years, Boston-NeuroTalks evolves due to contributions from people listed below. They served as administrators and actively maintained the email and/or calendar databases.
Yohan John, Siddharth Rajaram, Tren Huang, Neel Kishan, Arial Brown, Chaitanya Sai, Satrajit Ghosh, Rajeev Raizada, Aaron Seitz
