The European Union's major brain research endeavor is the Human Brain Project.
The project, which encompasses Big Science in terms of the number
of participants and its lofty ambitions, is a multidisciplinary coalition of
over one hundred partner institutions and includes professionals from the
disciplines of computer science, neurology, and robotics.
The Human Brain Project was launched in 2013 as an EU Future
and Emerging Technologies initiative with a budget of over one billion euros.
The ten-year project aims to make fundamental advancements
in neuroscience, medicine, and computer technology.
Researchers working on the Human Brain Project hope to learn
more about how the brain functions and how to imitate its computing skills.
Human Brain Organization, Systems and Cognitive
Neuroscience, Theoretical Neuroscience, and implementations such as the
Neuroinformatics Platform, Brain Simulation Platform, Medical Informatics
Platform, and Neuromorphic Computing Platform are among the twelve subprojects
of the Human Brain Project.
Six information and communication technology platforms were
released by the Human Brain Project in 2016 as the main research infrastructure
for ongoing brain research.
The project's research is focused on the creation of
neuromorphic (brain-inspired) computer chips, in addition to infrastructure
established for gathering and distributing data from the scientific community.
BrainScaleS is a subproject that uses analog signals to
simulate the neuron and its synapses.
SpiNNaker (Spiking Neural Network Design) is a supercomputer
architecture based on numerical models operating on special multicore digital
devices.
The Neurorobotic Platform is another ambitious subprogram,
where "virtual brain models meet actual or simulated robot bodies"
(Fauteux 2019).
The project's modeling of the human brain, which includes
100 billion neurons with 7,000 synaptic connections to other neurons,
necessitates massive computational resources.
Computer models of the brain are created on six
supercomputers at research sites around Europe.
These models are currently being used by project researchers
to examine illnesses.
The show has been panned.
Scientists protested in a 2014 open letter to the European
Commission about the program's lack of openness and governance, as well as the
program's small breadth of study in comparison to its initial goal and
objectives.
The Human Brain Project has a new governance structure as a result of an examination and review of its financing procedures, needs, and stated aims.
You may also want to read more about Artificial Intelligence here.
See also:
Blue Brain Project; Cognitive Computing; SyNAPSE.
Further Reading:
Amunts, Katrin, Christoph Ebell, Jeff Muller, Martin Telefont, Alois Knoll, and Thomas Lippert. 2016. “The Human Brain Project: Creating a European Research Infrastructure to Decode the Human Brain.” Neuron 92, no. 3 (November): 574–81.
Fauteux, Christian. 2019. “The Progress and Future of the Human Brain Project.” Scitech Europa, February 15, 2019. https://www.scitecheuropa.eu/human-brain-project/92951/.
Markram, Henry. 2012. “The Human Brain Project.” Scientific American 306, no. 6
(June): 50–55.
Markram, Henry, Karlheinz Meier, Thomas Lippert, Sten Grillner, Richard Frackowiak,
Stanislas Dehaene, Alois Knoll, Haim Sompolinsky, Kris Verstreken, Javier
DeFelipe, Seth Grant, Jean-Pierre Changeux, and Alois Sariam. 2011. “Introducing the Human Brain Project.” Procedia Computer Science 7: 39–42.
