Have you heard about the Human Brain Project? It is one of the largest funded projects to build a super computer that will replicate the molecular architecture of the human brain. This was done to understand how brain comprehends diseases, genomic sequencing, and eventually to correct the defects behind human brains. It included nuero-scientists, data scientists, and data engineers from more than 80 European Institutions who provided academic knowledge of their research on human brain. I wanted to write about this because for all aspiring scientists who want to contribute to the corpus of research about human brain, The Neurorobotics Platform (NRP) is an open platform on BitBucket which will keep growing.
There are so many interesting questions that can be asked here:
- What is consciousness?
- How does human brain pursue intelligence?
- How does neuro diseases get triggered and how can they be cured?
- How can human brain simulation be used for robots?
The team is currently creating a nuero-robotic mouse that can simulate human actions in the body of a robot. This platform is public and any developer can contribute to the brain inspired robots of the future. The HBP’s Medical Informatics Platform [MIP] seeks computer science algorithms to exploit medical data about impact of medicines in brain and search for new insights. Huge volumes of data, such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) brain scans from diseased and healthy human brains and its results for cognitive tests or diagnosis are recorded and fed into HBP. This is scanned by thousands of machine learning algorithms identifying new signatures from the brain.
What I am most interested in is the “Data Governance” aspect of the Human Brain Project. In this case, data governance includes control and oversight over related policies, standards, and procedures, with effective oversight managed by a regulatory group in the context of data about the human brain. The Human Brain Project deals with different types of data from different provenances, for different uses, by different people, in different contexts and countries, with different objectives and different means.
I had talked about the common data initiative and open AI in my previous blog posts. This is the HBP which will provide valuable information about human genomics and brain activity. Hopefully, more to come available for the public.
