News

The Human Brain Project (HBP) is delighted to announce that registration for the HBP Summit 2023 is open. The event will take place at the Palais du Pharo in Marseille, France, from March 28-31, 2023.

The festive reception will mark the start of the digital indexing of the Vogt archive.

Ukrainian brain researcher Nataliia Fedorchenko has been accepted as an associated PhD candidate at the Max Planck School of Cognition (MPSCog). She will carry out her PhD under the supervision of MPSCog faculty member Katrin Amunts at the Cécile and Oskar Vogt Institute of Brain Research at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf.

The multilevel Julich Brain Atlas developed by researchers in the Human Brain Project, could help in studying psychiatric and aging disorders by correlating brain networks with their underlying anatomical structure. By mapping microarchitecture with unprecedented levels of detail, the atlas allows for better understanding of brain connectivity and function. Researchers of the HBP have provided an overview of the Julich Brain Atlas in the journal Biological Psychiatry. The paper focuses on the cytoarchitecture and receptor architecture of the human brain, and how to apply the atlas in the field of psychiatric research.

To understand how our brain works, there is no getting around investigating how different brain regions are connected with each other by nerve fibres. In the most recent issue of Science, researchers of the Human Brain Project (HBP) review the current state of the field, provide insights on how the brain’s connectome is structured on different spatial scales – from the molecular and cellular to the macro level – and evaluate existing methods and future requirements for understanding the connectome’s complex organisation.

On 12 October, HBP Scientific Director Katrin Amunts and Tommaso Calarco, chair of the Quantum Community Network of the Quantum Flagship, presented two special pieces from Forschungszentrum Jülich to the European Commission in Brussels: an enlarged image of human brain fibres and a true-to-scale replica of the quantum computer "OpenSuperQ".

A new field of science has been emerging at the intersection of neuroscience and high-performance computing - this is the takeaway from the 2022 BrainComp conference, which took place in Cetraro, Italy from the 19th to the 22nd of September. The meeting, which featured international experts in brain mapping, machine learning, simulation, research infrastructures, neuro-derived hardware, neuroethics and more, strengthened the current collaborations in this emerging field and forged new ones.

Together, Neuroscience and Computing are driving forces for research and innovation. They enable new insights into the brain‘s complexity as well as biological information processing and lay ground for progress in Future Computing. Making use of this collaborative effort by bringing together relevant key players in the field of Neuroscience and Future Computing, the workshop on Brain-Inspired Computing (BrainComp) aims to shed a light on the digital transformation of Neuroscience by High Performance Computing (HPC).

In August 2022, Katrin Amunts from Forschungszentrum Jülich and Alan Evans from McGill University in Canada presented AI applications in brain mapping to German Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck and a delegation of high-ranking industry representatives during their visit of the Institut québécois d'intelligence artificielle (Mila) in Montreal.