Blue Brain
Blue Brain is great project which is to reverse engineer the human brain and reconstruct it at cellular level in computer simulation. Henry Markram founded the project in 2005 in Lausanne, Switzerland. The main goal of this project is to have a complete understanding of brain and developing brain treatment technology. The project involves the studying of brain slices under microscope and clamping electrodes. Data collected from different types of neutrons is used to develop realistic models of brain by creating a artificial network of neurons. In order to carry out the simulation, a super computer developed by IBM known as Blue Gene is used. Only a part of human brain is being experimented and simulated and according to the team the complete simulation of brain will be possible by 2023.
There are basically three phases to simulate a brain and create a virtual copy :
1. Data Acquisition
In data acquisition, the slices of human brain is studied under microscope to know about the electrical activities inside the brain. There are different types of neutrons in our brain which can be distinguished from one another by their shape, electrical behaviour, location and density. Algorithm are used to process all the mathematical information about a neutron and simulate biologically similar virtual neuron.
2. Simulation
A Software called NEURON which started developing in 1990 using C, C++ and FORTRAN and currently being improving day by day. NEURON is used to simulate the human brain, In 2012, the simulation with 10,000 neuron was 300x slower than the real time or 1 second of simulation time takes 5 minutes to complete. With the technological and algorithm advancements the simulation time is reducing and in future we may see a completely simulated brain capable of making its own decision just like a person realtime.
3. Visualisation
Blue Brain project team has internally developed a software to visualise the situation activities and the software is known as RTNeuron. The software is written in C++ and OpenGL. This software cannot be used for other types of simulation and very specific for Brain simulation which makes it much more faster in terms of performance. RTNeuron has the capability to render the simulation in 3D which makes it extremely useful and researcher can move from one neuron to other based on the activity. The animations can be stopped, resumed, zoomed and intact with the model
Funding
Blue Brain is primarily funded by EPFL which is one of two federally funded university in Switzerland(other is ETH in Zurich). In 2012, ETH requested €70 Million from Swiss Government for the project funding during 2013 to 2016. IBM has not funded the project but has sold the supercomputer “Blue Gene” to the project at reduced cost. Also the application made for EU FEET flagship grant for the Human Brain Project and would provide €1 Billion in funding over 10 years.
Official Blue Brain Project Site : http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/
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It is years I hear things about this project. This is really exciting! I hope they will manage...
YEAH! Looking forward to a brighter future!
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Thank you so Much!
This is quite fascinating... Bookmarked! Thank you for researching and sharing this information! 😄😇😄
Welcome!
Following you now! ;)
Thanks man!
Thank you for producing content that is interesting to me! ;)
Very interesting post and useful for me. I have the second week to collect information for a big article about copy of consciousness, and did not know about this project.
I find it pretty futuristic too :)
I don't know if I am impressed or scared.
LOL! You are right but risks will always be there. It is just like Nuclear power plant.
For a more critical appraisal of the Blue Brain project, and of Henry Markram's ambitious promises for it,
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-the-human-brain-project-went-wrong-and-how-to-fix-it/
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In my experience in AI, neurons are very practical physical nonlinear operators; but they are not very practical nonlinear operators in computation.
I could only see the project doing better than nonhuman AI (all of modern AI) if they were planning to build organic computers to run it.
Yeah! We don't know the capabilities of the blue brain project yet.