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New release: Brian 2.5

It took us a while, but we are very happy to finally announce a new release, Brian 2.5 🎉. This release comes with a large number of bug fixes, various small improvements to the C++ code generation process, new examples and improved documentation, as well as a more powerful “generator syntax” for synapse generation. In particular, it is now possible to generate a fixed number of synapses randomly – either for each pre-synaptic or for each post-synaptic cell. We have also updated our build and testing infrastructure, and now provide binary pip-installable packages for all platforms, including the fancy new Apple hardware. Please let us know if you run into any issues!

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New release: Brian 2.4

In these very particular times, we are nevertheless happy to announce a new release, Brian 2.4. This release fixes a large number of bugs and includes a number of small improvements. As announced with the previous release, Brian 2.4 is the first release that no longer supports Python 2. For a full list of changes, see the release notes. We recommend all users of Brian 2 to update.

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New Brian community forum

Ask questions, chat and learn with other Brian users, show off what you’ve done, suggest new features, … We will try out a brand new forum for support questions and general discussion, replacing our previous forums on Google Groups. The new forum builds on the Discourse platform which gives us exciting new features such as giving credit to users for answering questions.

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Brian online tutorial

We will experiment with running a Brian tutorial online. The first tutorial of this kind will take place on Friday, August 7th 2020 from 2pm-6pm BST (UTC+1, see here for other timezones). Free (but mandatory) registration here. We will run the tutorial as a Zoom meeting – registering with the link will give you the URL (please don’t share so we can avoid zoombombing). We will record the meeting and if everything goes reasonably well, we will upload the videos later.

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GSoC 2020: work on Brian during the summer

The INCF is again applying to be a mentor organization in Google’s Summer of Code program, a “a global program focused on bringing more student developers into open source software development”. Changes are quite high that it will be selected, since its participation in the last years was very successful. If this is the case, there will be an opportunity to work on the Brian simulator, please see the list of proposed projects (Brian projects are number 8 and 9). Feel free to ask questions or discuss the project on the Neurostars forum (find all projects in the GSoC category). It is not mandatory to work on one of the proposed projects, though, please contact marcel.stimberg@inserm.fr if you have an idea of your own.

New release: Brian 2.3

Happy New Year to all Brian users 🎉! We are happy to announce a new release, Brian 2.3. This release fixes a number of bugs and introduces some new features. It also paves the way for the transition from Python 2 to Python 3 – given that Python 2 is now no longer officially supported, Brian 2.3 will be the last release to support Python 2. For a full list of changes, see the release notes. We recommend all users of Brian 2 to update.

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Paper on Brian 2 published in eLife

We are happy to report that our paper “Brian 2, an intuitive and efficient neural simulator” has been accepted for publication in eLife: https://elifesciences.org/articles/47314

In this paper, we describe a number of examples that showcase various features of Brian 2, ranging from non-standard neuronal/synaptic models to interacting with hardware in real time via C++ code. All the code to run these examples is openly available in a github repository.
The examples are provided as interactive jupyter notebooks, and can be tried out without a local installation of Brian by running them on the binder infrastructure.

Brian 2.2

We are happy to announce the release of Brian 2.2. This release includes a number of important fixes and performance improvements. It also makes sure that simulation no longer give platform-dependent results for certain corner cases that involve the division of integers. For a full list of changes, see the release notes. We recommend all users of Brian 2 to update. Brian 2 can be installed with Anaconda from the conda-forge channel, or with pip from the pypi repository. Detailed installation instructions: http://brian2.readthedocs.io/en/2.2/introduction/install.html As always, please report bugs or suggestions to the github bug tracker (https://github.com/brian-team/brian2/issues) or to the brian-development mailing list (brian-development@googlegroups.com).