The Human Brain Project

The Human Brain 🧠 Project is a European Research Organization focused on understanding the Human Brain using today’s new computational power. I am part of this international research group thanks to my involvement in the 2017 Young Researcher Event and 2017 Researcher Event respectively in Geneva and Lausanne.

A view of a connectome

It is the European project to gather data, models and tools 🧰 around a unique platform and alleviate the power a supercomputer across Europe. It is designed to give researchers interested in the field, information on how to use some parts of the platform and how to create collaboration to run 🏃‍♀️ and share their data and results.

The events I attended to were designed to showcase some researchers work on the platform and to let us learn the tools together with the researchers that designed them.

My Involvement

During the course of 4 days, I have focused my interest mainly on the NeuroMorphic Platform and the NeuroBotic Platform. The first one, ☝️ is a platform which regroups two supercomputers with radically new and different designs. The first one called SpiNNaker is based in Manchester and the second one called BrainscaleS is based in Heideberg. In different they are creating new chip design to allow for ultra fast, large scale brain simulation. I gained now the ability to connect and run simulation on those computers.

The NRP is a simulation interface using gazebo that allows to simulate any physical environment and integrate any physical objects : houses, 🏠 , tables, balls, 🎾 , rats, 🐀 , robots, etc.. It allows for many ways to connect your simulated animals/robots to the HBP supercomputers -making it controllable by spiking neural networks- or any other scripts and Machine Learning interfaces. Removing the need to test complex Neural Networks on MNIST data or having to create robots, 🤖 to test it. It transforms a tedious process of creating the robots, developing the right controls and uploading/connecting the algorithm.

spinnaker representation

A video of the system is given here.