This past week a new interesting project about the human brain was approved by the European Commission. This project has been selected with an european flagship FET (Future and emerging technologies) which means it’s set to receive a billion euros and also to be funded as FET “flagships” over 10 years through its research and innovation funding programmes.
Modern neuroscience has been enormously productive but unsystematic. The data it produces describes different levels of biological organisation, in different areas of the brain in different species, at different stages of development. Today we urgently need to integrate this data, to show how the parts fit together in a single multi-level system.The “Human Brain Project” will create the world’s largest experimental facility for developing the most detailed model of the brain, for studying how the human brain works and ultimately to develop personalised treatment of neurological and related diseases. This research lays the scientific and technical foundations for medical progress that has the potential to will dramatically improve the quality of life for millions of Europeans.
The project will pursue four goals:
- Generate strategically selected data essential to seed brain atlases, build brain models and catalyse contributions from other groups.
- Identify mathematical principles underlaying the relationships between different levels of brain organisation.
- Integrate systems of Information and Communications Technologies, providing platforms offering services to neuroscientists, clinical researches and technology developers.
- Develop first draft models and prototype technologies, demonstrating how the platforms can be used to produce results with immediate value for basic neuroscience, medicine and computing technology.
From this goals they generate other subgoals that the project wants to achieve, I want to remark the next ones:
Understanding the relationships between brain structure and function, integrate the principles of cognition, that from a technological perspective it would give developers the tools they need to develop robots with the potential to achieve human-like capabilities, impossible to realise in systems that do not have a brain-like controller. The Human Brain Project work in neuromorphic computing and neurorobotics would open the road for the development of compact low-power systems with the long-term potential to achieve brain-like intelligence.
I want to end this post with the next paragraph quoted from the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors,2011.
The appeal of neuromorphic architectures lies in i) their potential to achieve (human-like) intelligence based on unreliable devices typically found in neuronal tissue, ii) their strategies to deal with anomalies, emphasising not only tolerance to noise and faults, but also the active exploitation of noise to increase the effectiveness of operations, and iii) their potential for low-power operation. Traditional von Neumann machines are less suitable with regard to item i), since for this type of tasks they require a machine complexity ( the number of gates and computational power), that tends to increase exponentially with the complexity of the environment (the size of the input). Neuromorphic systems, on the other hand, exhibit a more gradual increase of their machine complexity with respect to the environmental complexity. Therefore, at the level of human-like computing tasks, neuromorphic machines have the potential to be superior to von Neumann machines
HBP-videoverview from Human Brain Project on Vimeo.
source for the information: The Human Brain Project. A report to the European Commission.
