The Blue Brain Project is an attempt to create a synthetic brain by reverse-engineering the mammalian brain down to the molecular level. The aim of the project, founded in May 2005 by the Brain and Mind Institute of the École Polytechnique in Lausanne, Switzerland, is to study the brain's architectural and functional principles. The project is headed by the Institute's director, Henry Markram. Using a Blue Gene supercomputer running Michael Hines's NEURON software, the simulation does not consist simply of an artificial neural network, but involves a biologically realistic model of neurons. It is hoped that it will eventually shed light on the nature of consciousness. There are a number of sub-projects, including the Cajal Blue Brain, coordinated by the Supercomputing and Visualization Center of Madrid (CeSViMa), and others run by universities and independent laboratories in the UK, US, and Israel.
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Biographical Sketches
Sean Hill is the Blue Brain Project Manager for Computational Neuroscience. Dr. Hill received his Ph.D. in Computational Neuroscience from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland where he investigated the computational role of the auditory thalamocortical circuitry in the rat. He subsequently held postdoctoral positions at The Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In the course of his research, Hill has developed numerous large-scale models of neural systems and is the designer/developer of the general-purpose neural simulator Synthesis. As part of his research, he developed the first large-scale model of the cat visual thalamocortical system that replicates neural activity during wakefulness and sleep. He began his work with the Blue Brain project as a member of the Computational Biology Group at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in 2006 and became a Blue Brain employee in 2008. His research interests include the use of biologically-realistic models to study the role of emergent phenomena in information processing, network connectivity and synaptic plasticity in the central nervous system, from the neocortical column to the whole brain, and across different arousal conditions including waking and sleep. Henry Markram is the Founder and Co-Director of EPFL's Brain Mind Institute and Director of the Blue Brain Project. He obtained his Ph.D from the Weizmann Institute of Science where he discovered a link between acetylcholine and memory mechanisms. At the Max Planck Institute he discovered calcium transients in dendrites evoked by sub-threshold activity and by single action potentials propagating back into dendrites. He also began studying the connectivity between neocortical neurons. Markram discovered Spike Timing Dependent Plasticity (STDP) by altering the precise millisecond relative timing of single pre- and post-synaptic action potentials, which revealed a highly precise learning mechanism operating between neurons. He moved back to the Weizmann Institute where he started his systematic reverse engineering of the neocortical microcircuitry. He discovered a number of key principles of microcircuit structure and design and a novel view of synaptic learning called redistribution of synaptic efficacy. Based on the emergent dynamics of the neocortical microcircuit he and Wolfgang Maass developed the theory of liquid computing to explain computing in high entropy states. In 2002, he moved to EPFL as full professor and founder/director of the Brain Mind Institute. At the BMI, Markram developed state of art technologies to obtain a detailed blueprint of the neocortical column. He launched the Blue Brain Project with the support of IBM in 2005 to rebuild and simulate the neocortical column and is expanding the BBP to simulate the whole brain of mammals. Markram has received numerous awards and published over 80 papers.
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