13 October, 2013

the Human Brain Project has kicked-off

Understanding the human brain is one of the greatest challenges facing 21st century science. If we can rise to the challenge, we can gain profound insights into what makes us human, develop new treatments for brain disease and build revolutionary new computing technologies. Today, for the first time, modern information and communications technology (ICT) has brought these goals within sight. Today, the convergence between biology and ICT has reached a point at which it can turn the goal of understanding the human brain into a reality. It is this realization that motivates the Human Brain Project (HBP) ; an EU Flagship initiative in which over 80 partners will work together to realize a new "ICT-accelerated" vision for brain research and its applications.

In October 2013 the Human Brain Project's official kick-off was carried out during the HBP Summit held in Laussane. In addition to the meeting of scientists from the HBP's 80+ partner institutions, the programme included the first meeting of the HBP General Assembly, an international media event, an open-doors poster session for students, researchers, journalists and members of the general public, and a special dinner to celebrate the start of the HBP's 10-year enterprise.

The Human Brain Project is a ten-year project, consisting of a thirty-month ramp-up phase, funded under FP7, with support from a special flagship ERANET, and a ninety-month operational phase, to be funded under Horizon 2020. The project, which will have a total budget of over Euro 1 billion, is European-led with a strong element of international cooperation. The goal of the project is to build a completely new ICT infrastructure for neuroscience, and for brain-related research in medicine and computing, catalysing a global collaborative effort to understand the human brain and its diseases and ultimately to emulate its computational capabilities.



The proposed infrastructure will consist of six ICT-based research platforms, providing neuroscientists, medical researchers and technology developers with access to highly innovative tools and services that can radically accelerate the pace of their research. These will include a Neuroinformatics Platform, that links to other international initiatives, bringing together data and knowledge from neuroscientists around the world and making it available to the scientific community; a Brain Simulation Platform, that integrates this information in unifying computer models, allowing in silico experiments, impossible in the lab; a High Performance Computing Platform that provides the interactive supercomputing technology neuroscientists need for data-intensive modelling and simulations; a Medical Informatics Platform that federates clinical data from around the world, providing researchers with new mathematical tools to search for biological signatures of disease; a Neuromorphic Computing Platform that makes it possible to translate brain models into a new class of hardware devices and to test their applications; a Neurorobotics Platform, allowing neuroscience and industry researchers to experiment with virtual robots controlled by brain models developed in the project. The platforms are all based on previous pioneering work by the partners and will be available for internal testing within eighteen months of the start of the project. Within thirty months, the platforms will be open for use by the community, receiving continuous upgrades to their capabilities, for the duration of the project.

The HBP will trigger and drive a global, collaborative effort that uses the platforms to address fundamental issues in future neuroscience, future medicine and future computing. A significant and steadily growing proportion of the budget will be devoted to research by groups outside the original HBP Consortium, working on themes of their own choosing. The expected end results will include a new understanding of the brain and its diseases and radically new forms of ICT, that exploit this knowledge. The social economic and industrial impact is potentially enormous.

Federating more than 80 European and international research institutions, the Human Brain
Project is planned to last ten years (2013-2023). The cost is estimated at 1.19 billion euros.
The project will also associate some important North American and Japanese partners. It willbe coordinated at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, byneuroscientist Henry Markram with co-directors Karlheinz Meier of Heidelberg University,
Germany, and Richard Frackowiak of Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois (CHUV) and the University of Lausanne (UNIL).

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