This dailymail article claims that the Human Brain Project, directed by Henry Markram, is pursuing a 1 billion euro grant to simulate the human brain in 12 years.
By way of Nextbigfuture, by way of Hackernews.
(from 2003) Jaron Lanier talks about the “phenotropic” programme, which consists of trying to design software systems that uses pattern recognition, rather than protocols, for communication between components of the system.
Two neat tools concerned with the “connectome” (i.e. the pattern of connections in the nervous system):
Semantic wiki:
http://www.connectome.ch/wiki/Main_Page
Desktop viewer:
http://connectomeviewer.org/viewer “Multi-Modal Multi-Level Network and Neuroimaging Visualization and Analysis” (screencasts)
The statistics of shot durations in 150 films from 1935 to 2005 were analyzed. From about 1970 to the present, the power spectrum of shot durations in individual films has tended to become more like pink noise (power ~= 1/f). Also, autocorrelation shows that the lengths of nearby shots has become more and more correlated.
Octave/MATLAB toolkit for analysis of spike train data. Open source. Information theory-y.
You’ve probably read by now about the announcement by IBM’s Cognitive Computing group that they had created a “computer system that simulates and emulates the brain’s abilities for sensation, perception, action, interaction and cognition” at the “scale of a cat cortex”. For their work, the IBM team led by Dharmendra Modha was awarded the ACM Gordon Bell prize, which recognizes “outstanding achievement in high-performance computing”.
A few days later, Henry Markram, leader of the Blue Brain Project at EPFL, sent off an e-mail to IBM CTO Bernard Meyerson harshly criticizing the IBM press release, and cc’ed several reporters. This brought a spate of shock media into the usually placid arena of computational neuroscience reporting, with headlines such as “IBM’s cat-brain sim a ‘scam,’ says Swiss boffin: Neuroscientist hairs on end”, and “Meow! IBM cat brain simulation dissed as ‘hoax’ by rival scientist”. One reporter chose to highlight the rivalry as cat versus rat, using the different animal model choice of the two researchers as a theme. Since then, additional criticisms from Markram have appeared online.
Find out more after the jump.
A very cool article on a new open source, online system to crowd source the assemblage of data in neuroscience from the Voice of San Diego. From the article:
Traditionally, the study of the brain was organized somewhat like an archipelago. Neuroscientists would inhabit their own island or peninsula of the brain, and see little reason to venture elsewhere.
Molecular neuroscientists, who study how DNA and RNA function in the brain, didn’t share their work with cognitive specialists who study how psychological and cognitive functions are produced by the brain, for example.
But there has been an awakening to the idea that brains of humans and mammals should be studied like the complex, and interrelated systems that they are. Neuroscientists realized that they had to start collaborating across disciplines and sharing their data if they wanted to make advances in their own field.
[...]
Ellisman and his UCSD colleagues have devised a solution: crowdsource a brain. And this week they unveiled their years-long project — the Whole Brain Catalog — at the annual convention of the Society for Neuroscience, the largest gathering of brain experts in the world.
We had read that Dr. Henry Markram of the Blue Brain project had given a talk at TED (technology, entertainment, design), but the video wasn’t released until this month. This talk is geared towards a general audience, rather than getting into the specific details of the Blue Brain project, as he has before. It is engaging and includes many suggestions towards the future of neuroscience and AI.
This poster, by Bennett, Baird, Miller, and Wolford, provides a memorable reminder that you have to do a statistical correction for multiple comparisons when you datamine a large number of things for correlation.
“The task administered to the salmon involved completing an open-ended mentalizing task. The salmon was shown a series of photographs depicting human individuals in social situations with a specified emotional valence. The salmon was asked to determine what emotion the individual in the photo must have been experiencing.”
The journal, Frontiers in Neuroscience, edited by Idan Segev, has made it Volume 3, issue 1. Launching last year at the Society for Neuroscience conference, its probably the newest Neuroscience-related journal.
I’m a fan of it because it is an open-access journal featuring a “tiered system” and more. From their website:
The Frontiers Journal Series is not just another journal. It is a new approach to scientific publishing. As service to scientists, it is driven by researchers for researchers but it also serves the interests of the general public. Frontiers disseminates research in a tiered system that begins with original articles submitted to Specialty Journals. It evaluates research truly democratically and objectively based on the reading activity of the scientific communities and the public. And it drives the most outstanding and relevant research up to the next tier journals, the Field Journals.