So, the Human Brain Project, HBP. This Human Brain Project is very
different than the Blue Brain Project because the Blue Brain Project sits only
here, in the top left corner, the simulation aspect of it.
But the Human Brain Project has many, many, many, many other new different
aspects. Because the whole notion here is to
develop a platform for understanding the brain, but also using this platform not
only to understand the brain but also to develop new technologies.
To develop new super computing capabilities.
To develop new visualization of activity anatomy of large networks.
To develop new microchips, neuromorphic brain inspired microchips that are very
cheap energetically and very efficient as a basis for modern computers, or maybe
even for modern robots. So, there are all these many, many
aspects, but of course, I don't have now time to talk about each one separately.
But I want to mention one thing that to me is very important.
The aspect of society, the aspect of education.
Because we are now approaching a new era with these big projects, this new era
will provide new amazing information, new amazing technologies, very useful for
society, that will impact society in many ways.
It will have ethical, it will have industrial, it will have sociological
implications and we as scientist are responsible for telling you the public,
what comes out of this project. So within the human brain project, beyond
the technology and the neuroscience and so forth, there is the society aspect.
How do we interact with you? Ongoing and so we develop a plat, a
platform. An idea how to interact, how to interface
between us and you through museums, science museums.
Ongoing, online that would be a brain corner and so on.
I'm not going to talk about this issue and also the ethical aspect that may
emerge from such a project. I'm just saying we are very aware of this
society aspect. I want also to emphasize that this is a
global project. You can see all the countries in Europe
and also in America, and also in South America, that are involved.
It's led by Europe, it is led by the EPFL, by the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale
de Lausanne. It is led by Henry Markram and his
colleagues, us. But eventually many, many countries like
in England and in Sweden, and in Norway and in Israel, and in Italy and in Spain
are involved. You can see how many labs are part of it,
you can see how many institutions. So, this whole project, this one billion
Euro project, will be distributed trying to combine efforts, to integrate efforts.
Expertise from Spain about anatomy, expertise from physiology in one place,
expertise in, in, in computers in another place.
Expertise in modeling in the third place, in order to really achieve the goal.
And the goal is built from basically, in a nutshell from three, one may say,
pillars. The neuroscience is clear, we are trying
to understand the brain. So there is the neuron, the building
platform for data basing the brain, I already mentioned it.
Okay? There is, the medical aspect, so we are
trying to improve our understanding of diseases of the brain.
But there is the medical aspect of it, and there is the future computing, the
emerging technologies coming out of this project.
So this project basically is a platform project, it's not about now finding
details, it's about developng approaches. Both in neuroscience and in medicine, and
in future computing. And these approaches should be inspired,
this platform, is inspired by what we understand about the brain as a computing
device. So we want to get new understanding of
the brain of course. We want to get new treatments from brain
diseases. And we want to get new brain like
computing technology. Because the claim here, in this
information and com, computation technology based research here.
This project is part of this future emerging technologies of the Europe.
The claim is, that the brain is physical system that computes extremely
efficiently, very efficiently, with very, I, I am just drinking water for this
lecture, and here I can stand and do millions of computations very, very
cheaply in terms of energy. So the super computers now, take so much
energy that we cannot easily increase it by a million, but we do all this
computation successfully most of the time with very cheap, 20 watts.
Can we learn from the brain to develop the next, the future technologies of
computer. So this is the future computing aspect.
And of course within each one of them, we're going to build technologies, build
technologies. Neuroinformatics data basing, approaching
querying of the data in a sophisticated way.
Simulation techniques, new mathematical approaches, new algorithm for simulations
the brain. Medical informatics databasing the the,
the diseases and so on. We also as I said want to be inspired by
the brain and develop neuromorphic computing based on spikes, based on
synapses, artificial synapses in hardware and eventually, neurorobotics.
Robotics like we are, physical robots behaving in the world.
Can we build robots based on what we learned about us, about our body, about
our brain. So within the brain simulation, of course
we have simulations at many levels, we need to simulate genes, synapses,
networks, and the whole brain. And maybe each level requires some
particular approach, mathematically, some particular equations that are better, to
describe this level and so forth. All these, simulation should be unified,
in some way that we can easily move from this level to this level mathematically.
And this, this really requires deep thinking, and very good mathematical
iteraticians. So we want to really eventually, use all
these kind of integrated approach to take fragments of data, be inspired with this
data, put them together in the model and the model will give us predictions.
We don't think we know, we need to know everything, in advance to build the
brain. We needs to, we need to get principles
from building, from what we already have: pieces of the brain, fragments of the
brain, fragments, from fragments, we shall get the understanding of the whole.
Because pieces will fall within each other, and the puzzle will, will come
out. We don't need to put all the details one
after the other because of the constraints by already, what is already
known, and put inside. So, this is the idea about simulations on
which I talked a lot. About in medical informatics, one of the
problem you may know is that the physicians themselves do not have access
to data easily, to data in other hospitals or in other locations.
So one of the idea is to really accelerate understanding of brain
diseases, by gathering and organizing fragments of the data about diseases.
I already showed you the [UNKNOWN], which is a beginning attempt.
But we want really to drive the data together, and drive massive collaboration
between hospitals. So this is one of the missions of the
human brain project. Which is a completely different ma,
mission than the, than the blue brain product, is to go into medicine and try
to make some type of organized systematic.
Putting together data on brain diseases from all hospitals in an accessible
systematic umbrella, the human brain project.
And then of course, hopefully when you put things together under one frame work,
the data from the hospitals, from the physicians into systematic place.
You may start to query, you may get answers much better than in the brain of
a single physician, or a single neuroscientist.
It now collective brain, put into a wise system, informatic system about brain
diseases. And I mentioned the future computing,
because you really want to learn from the brain itself, to be inspired by the
brain, to build future computing technologies.
So you want to, the brain is a physical proof that it's possible.
And so how did the brain solve this problem of energy, of so many microchips
interacting? How did the brain solve the plasticity,
the learning, the fact that you learn while behaving.
We want to develop these kind of computers, inspired by the brain.
So you can see that the brain can be our teacher for developing new technologies,
super computers that do much, much better than today.
And that's why mission, it will be really important and probably will change
society if we can have this kind of adaptive, wise and energetic chip
computer. So, I gave you a broad summary of the
blue brain project seed, and the human brain project, very different, large
scale. Hopefully, we should know within ten
years, I'm sure it will be, a successful project, whereby integration of many,
many disciplines. Computers, computer scientists,
engineers, informatics, database, physiologists, anatomists, psychologists
put together in order to really, really dwell into a new direction of brain
research. Next week we will have a guest speaker.
A well known scientist, Professor Israel Nelken, he will talk about perception,
action, cognition and emotions in the brain.
So thank you very much. See you next week.