Human Brain Project

The Human Brain Project (HBP) was a EU scientific research project that ran for ten years from 2013 to 2023, with a total budget of €1 billion. Using high-performance exascale supercomputers it built infrastructure that allowed researchers to advance knowledge in the fields of neuroscience, computing and brain-related medicine. Its successor was the European Brain Research Infrastructures (EBRAINS) project. The Project, which started on 1 October 2013, was a European Commission Future and Emerging Technologies Flagship. The HBP was coordinated by the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and was largely funded by the European Union. The project coordination office was in Geneva, Switzerland. Peer-reviewed research finds that the public discussion forum (the Human Brain Project forum) was actively utilized and showed resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic. The HBP forum has been most actively utilized and useful for solving questions related to programming issues and questions close to HBP core areas.

Strategic goals and organisation

Fundamental to the HBP approach is to investigate the brain on different spatial and temporal scales (i.e. from the molecular to the large networks underlying higher cognitive processes, and from milliseconds to years). To achieve this goal, the HBP relies on the collaboration of scientists from diverse disciplines, including neuroscience, philosophy and computer science, to take advantage of the loop of experimental data, modelling theories and simulations. The idea is that empirical results are used to develop theories, which then foster modelling and simulations which result in predictions that are in turn verified by empirical results. The primary objective of the HBP is to create an ICT-based research infrastructure for brain research, cognitive neuroscience and brain-inspired computing, which can be used by researchers world-wide. The Project is divided into 12 Subprojects. Six of these develop ICT-based platforms (Subprojects 5-10), which consist of prototype hardware, software, databases, and programming interfaces. These tools are available to researchers worldwide via the HBP Collaboratory. Four Subprojects gather data on empirical neuroscience and establish theoretical foundations (Subprojects 1–4) and one is responsible for ethics and society (Subproject 12). Subproject 11 coordinates the project.

SP1 Mouse Brain Organisation: Understanding the structure of the mouse brain, and its electrical and chemical functions SP2 Human Brain Organisation: Understanding the structure of the human brain, and its electrical and chemical functions SP3 Systems and Cognitive Neuroscience: Understanding how the brain performs its systems-level and cognitive functional activities SP4 Theoretical Neuroscience: Deriving high-level mathematical models to synthesize conclusions from research data SP5 Neuroinformatics Platform: Gathering, organising and making available brain data SP6 Brain Simulation Platform: Developing data-driven reconstructions of brain tissue and simulation capabilities to explore these reconstructions SP7 High-performance Analytics and Computing Platform: Providing the ICT capability to map the brain in unprecedented detail, construct complex models, run large simulations, and analyse large volumes of data SP8 Medical Informatics Platform: Developing the infrastructure to share hospital and medical research data for the purpose of understanding disease clusters and their respective disease signatures SP9 Neuromorphic Computing Platform: Developing and applying brain-inspired computing technology SP10 Neurorobotics Platform: Developing virtual and real robots and environments for testing brain simulations SP11 Management and Coordination: General coordination of the project SP12 Ethics and Society: Exploring the ethical and societal impact of HBP's work The HBP is coordinated by the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and involves researchers from over 117 partner institutions in 19 countries across Europe. Notable Partner Institutions include the University of Heidelberg, Forschungszentrum Jülich, and the University Hospital of Lausanne. The scientific direction is provided by representatives from each of the HBP's Subprojects, which form the Science and Infrastructure Board (SIB). Katrin Amunts from Forschungszentrum Jülich is the Chair of the SIB. Alois Knoll from TU Munich is Vice Chair of the SIB for software. The Directorate steers the daily work of the HBP – it is led by Andreas Mortensen from EPFL.

Funding The HBP is funded by the European Commission Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DG CONNECT) under the FP7 framework, an EU Research and Innovation funding programme. It was one of the two initial Future Emerging Technologies (FET) Flagship projects. The project is split into five phases, each supplied with separate funding. The call for funding for the Project's initial two-and-a-half-year 'Ramp-Up Phase' of EUR 54 million closed in November 2013 and the results were announced in March 2014. Twenty-two projects from thirty-two organisations were selected for the initial funding of EUR 8.3 million. The Ramp-Up Phase ended on 31 March 2016. Funding is reassessed every two years using Specific Grant Agreements (SGA); the first of which began in April 2016 (ending in April 2018), and the second with a total EU funding of 88 Million Euro starting in April 2018 (ending in March 2020). The HBP's total costs are estimated at EUR 1.019 billion, of which EUR 500 million will be provided by the European Commission, EUR 500 million by national, public and private organisations, and EUR 19 million by the Core Project Ramp-Up Phase Partners.

Obstacles One of the Project's primary hurdles is the unsystematic nature of the information collected from previous brain research. Neurological research data varies by biological organisation schemes, species studied, and by developmental stages, making it difficult to collectively use the data to replicate the brain in a model that acts as a single system. Other obstacles include engineering problems involving power consumption, memory, and storage. For example, detailed neuron representations are very computationally expensive, and whole brain simulation is at the leading edge of our computational capability.

Implications

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