Three Catalan entities participate in Human Brain Project
This is one of the most ambitious projects kicked off by the European Union, with a budget of approximately €1,200 millions.
By Biocat
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS), University of Barcelona (UB) and Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) are partners in the Human Brain Project. These three entities, along with the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) as a collaborator, are part of the international team working to better understand our brain.
From the BSC-CNS, participants include Rosa M. Badia, Javier Bartolomé, Sergi Girona, Jesús Labarta and Àlex Ramírez. The whole project will use programming models (OmpSs and COMPSs) developed by the BSC-CNS with their star supercomputer, the MareNostrum, which will also be used to carry out simulations on a neuronal level. From the UPF, ICREA professor Gustavo Deco, head of the Computational Neuroscience group. UB researcher, head of the EventLab and ICREA professor Mel Slater will research how the brain represents the body through imaging studies. And Mavi Sánchez-Vives will also take part, head of the Systems Neuroscience group at the August Pi i Sunyer Biomedical Research Institute (Idibaps) and scientific director of the B·Debate scientific debates How Mind Emerges from Brain: a View into the Future in 2012.
Additionally, head of the IRB Barcelona Molecular Modeling and Bioinformatics laboratory, Modesto Orozco, and head of the UB Neurobiology of Development and Neuronal Regeneration group, Eduardo Soriano, will be collaborators on the project.
The Human Brain Project was kicked off on 7 October 2013 at the headquarters of the coordinating institution, the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne (EPFL), in Switzerland. Conceived of as the most ambitious neuroscience project in the world, it features hundreds of researchers from more than 130 research centers and a budget of approximately €1,200 millions.
Over the next two and a half years, the work will focus on creating an integrated system of six research platforms to help scientists meet the goals set. The platforms involved will be those in neuroinformatics, brain stimulation, high-performance computing, medical informatics, neuromorphic computation and neurorobotics. Once developed, in 2016, the Human Brain Project will have the tools, facilities and methods needed to begin research into how the human brain works.
More information is available on the Human Brain Project website.