The Human Brain Project (HBP) announces the start of its final phase as an EU-funded FET Flagship. The European Commission has signed a grant agreement to fund the HBP with 150 million Euros from now until 2023.

EBRAINS infrastructure

Over the next three years, the project will narrow its focus to advance three core scientific areas – brain networks, their role in consciousness, and artificial neural nets – while expanding its innovative EBRAINS infrastructure. EBRAINS offers the most comprehensive atlas and database on the human brain, directly coupled with powerful computing and simulation tools, to research communities around neuroscience, medicine and technology.

Currently transitioning into a sustainable infrastructure, EBRAINS will remain available to the scientific community, as a lasting contribution of the HBP to global scientific progress.

Supercomputers, Big Data Analytics, Simulation, Robots and AI have all become new additions to the “toolbox” of modern neuroscience – a development strongly pushed forward by the HBP and its EBRAINS infrastructure.

Started in 2013 as a FET Flagship project, the HBP is the largest brain science project in Europe. Now entering the final phase of its ten-year lifespan, the project is proud to present its scientific workplan and transformative technological offerings for brain research and brain-inspired research and development.

The new phase focuses on three topics

HBP’s scientific activities in the new phase focus on three topics: networks that are studied across different spatial and temporal scales, their significance for consciousness and disorders of consciousness, and the development of artificial neural networks and neurorobotics.

These topics will be developed hand in hand with the EBRAINS research infrastructure.

Likewise, a growing community of external users and partnering projects, researchers working on a range of neuroscientific questions increasingly benefit from the diverse methods that are seamlessly integrated in EBRAINS.

We will make the infrastructure more efficient, attractive and user-friendly”, says HBP Scientific Research Director Prof. Katrin Amunts. Researchers and engineers are working closely together on this, ‘co-designing’ technical solutions that fit the science needs perfectly. This creates a win-win situation for both communities, Amunts says.

EBRAINS today already provides researchers with a wide spectrum of unique services, resources and technologies, for example, a multi-level human brain atlas, which is navigable in 3D, linked to a growing neuroscientific data base, as well as access to a federated system of most powerful European supercomputers, and brain-inspired "neuromorphic" computers pushing simulation and deep learning analytics to new horizons.

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