[Announcement] Free online training workshop/hackathon for AutoBIDSify - any-to-BIDS data standardization framework - March 26
Qianqian Fang
(You received this message because you are a registered user of MCX (https://mcx.space), Iso2Mesh (https://iso2mesh.sf.net) or NeuroJSON tools (https://neurojson.io) . If you are no longer interested in these software tools, please feel free to click on the unsubscribe link at the bottom of this email. In that case, we apologize for the inconvenience.)
Dear colleagues,
For those of you who are interested in sharing fNIRS/neuroimaging datasets in the BIDS format but could not get started because of the daunting task of manually performing the conversion, we have a good news! My team has developed a fully automated any-dataset-to-BIDS converter, AutoBIDSify -- a large-language-model-(LLM)-empowered fully-automated neuroimaging data standardization framework that integrates semantic reasoning with rule-based execution to convert heterogeneous neuroimaging files into BIDS datasets. Using a single command with Auto-BIDSify, researchers can automatically extract relevant experimental information from diverse data files, populate BIDS metadata files, and convert/reorganize user data files into BIDS-compatible datasets, making them readily available for dissemination to data sharing portals, such as OpenNeuro.org and NeuroJSON.io
To help users rapidly adopt this powerful and streamlined data standardization tool, we are excited to announce a free online training workshop on March 26 (in 3 weeks) at 11 AM – 1 PM EST (5PM-7PM CET) for the training workshop, followed by a 2-hour individually guided hands-on session (hackathon) to help you convert your own datasets between 1:30 – 3:30 PM EST (7:30PM-9:30PM CET).
Please find the details of AutoBIDSify in this web page:
To participate in this workshop+hackathon, please submit a simple registration form - seats are limited, register today!
https://neurojson.org/wiki/index.cgi?register/NeuroJSON_AutoBIDSify_Workshop_2026
Currently, AutoBIDSify can automatically handle many fNIRS/MRI
related data files, including
.snirf/.nirs/.nii/.nii.gz/.mat/.dcm/.json/.txt/.md/.pdf/.docx/.xlsx;
it can read, understand and extract many experiment related
metadata, and automatically produce the BIDS-required metadata
files, including dataset_description.json, participants.tsv etc.
With a single command, it can perform end-to-end
conversion/reorganization of the input data files, regardless how
they are named and organized, into BIDS-compliant dataset
packages.
Please also see my social media announcement for more details
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7435016594948345856/
We strongly encourage all researchers who are interested in joining the SfNIRS fNIRS Data Contest 2026 and those who are interested in submitting a Data Paper to the Special Issue of Neurophotonics entitled "fNIRS Commons: Datasets and Tools for Open, Reproducible Science". Please take advantage of this automated tool and save your time for organizing and converting your datasets!
For the Hackathon part, if you don't have your own datasets, you can still participate - we will provide a list of publicly available non-BIDS datasets, you can pick one and help us convert it to BIDS and NeuroJSON/JSON format. Regardless whether it is your lab dataset or public fNIRS/DOT datasets, if you are willing to contribute your converted dataset to our NeuroJSON.io data portal, we will offer a small gift as either a NeuroJSON T-shirt or baseball cap. We will mail it to you after the hackathon!
We look forward to seeing you in our workshop and hackathon in 3 weeks!
Qianqian