Public event: EBRAINS - New enabling infrastructure for neuroscience

Katrin Amunts did a postdoctoral fellowship at the C. & O. Vogt Institute of Brain Research at Duesseldorf University, Germany. In 1999, she set up a new research unit for Brain Mapping at the Research Center Juelich, Germany. In 2004, she became professor for Structural-Functional Brain Mapping, and in 2008 a full professor at the Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics at the RWTH Aachen University as well as director of the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1) at the Research Center Juelich. Since 2013, she is a full professor for Brain Research, director of the C. and O. Vogt Institute of Brain Research, Heinrich-Heine University Duesseldorf and director of the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1), Research Center Juelich.

Katrin Amunts is a member of the editorial board of Brain Structure and Function. She is member of the German Ethics Council since 2012, and has been elected as vice chair in 2016. Katrin Amunts is the programme speaker of the programme Decoding the Human Brain of the Helmholtz Association, Germany. She is leading Subproject 2 Human Brain Organization of the European Flagship Project The Human Brain Project (HBP). In 2016, she has been elected as Scientific Research Director and Chair of the Science and Infrastructure Board (SIB) of the HBP. Since 2017 Katrin Amunts is co-speaker of the graduate school Max-Planck School of Cognition and since 2018 she is a member of the International Advisory Council Healthy Brains for Healthy Lives, Canada.

In order to better understand the organizational principles of the human brain, she and her team aim to develop a multi-level and multi-scale brain atlas, and use methods of high-performance computing to generate ultra-high resolution human brain models.

Lecture title: Introduction to the Human Brain Project

Jan Bjaalie, M.D., Ph.D., is professor at the Institute of Basic Medical Sciences, University of Oslo, and Infrastructure Operations Director and leader of the Neuroinformatics Platform of the EU Human Brain Project. He was founding Executive Director of the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF) and is currently head of the INCF Norwegian Node and member of the INCF Council for Training, Science, and Infrastructure. His research group has studied wiring patterns in the brain and developed data systems for organizing and managing heterogeneous neuroscience research data by use of a new generation of digital brain atlases. The group develops software and workflows for analysis of data integrated in the atlases (“Google maps of the brain”). Jan Bjaalie is Chief editor of Frontiers in Neuroinformatics and Section editor of Brain Structure and Function.

Lecture title: EBRAINS - A platform for collaboration in digital neuroscience

Rüdiger Dillmann received his Ph. D. from the University of Karlsruhe in 1980. Since 1987 he has been Professor of the Department of Computer Science and is Director of the Research Lab Humanoids and Intelligence Systems at KIT.  In 2002, he became the director of an innovation lab at the Research Center for Information Science (FZI), Karlsruhe. Since 2009 he has been spokesman of the Institute of Anthropomatics at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and founder of the KIT – Focus Anthropomatics and Robotics. His research interest is in the areas of humanoid robotics and neurorobotics with special emphasis on intelligent, autonomous and interactive robot behaviour based on machine learning methods and programming by demonstration (PbD). Other research interests include machine vision for mobile systems, man-machine interaction, computer-supported intervention in surgery and related simulation techniques. He is the author/co-author of more than 900 scientific publications, conference papers, several books and book contributions. Rüdiger Dillmann was Coordinator of the German Collaborative Research Center ”Humanoid Robots”, SFB 588 and several European IPs. He is the Editor of  the journal ”Robotics and Autonomous Systems”, Elsevier, and Editor in Chief of the book series COSMOS, Springer. He is an IEEE Fellow.

Lecture title: Translation of neuromorphic principles towards closed loop SSN-based sensomotoric robot controls

The long term goal of this research is to understand, to translate and to model biomorphic neural principles focusing on brain related  senso-motoric control functionalities and to ground them with the help of real robots . This involves  interdisciplinary and collaborating research as it is done within the HBP. Spiking neural networks (SNN) have the potential on  replicating real neurons reflecting parts of their biological characteristics. SNNs are capable to perform synaptic spike-based communication, they allow modeling of local brain functionalities including learning and plasticity mechanisms. We assume, that the brain is composing sensor-motor primitives as  building blocks for prediction, generation and execution of motions. The combination of neural simple motion primitives represent muscle synergies and yield towards  more complex and advanced motions.  The authors present results of their research on bio-inspired SNN control architectures capable to perform tasks like object recognition, object tracking, target reaching and grasping as well as collision- and obstacle avoidance. The experimental evaluation with a robot arm in closed loop control mode is performed without any planning algorithms nor calculation of kinematic transformations. Spiking neural network are used to represent motions in a hierarchy of motor primitives. Biologically plausible reward-learning rules based on synaptic sampling show that the SNNs are capable of learning performing policies. Neuroscientists have established links between reward-modulated synaptic plasticity and online reinforcement learning.  The hyper-parameters of this neuromodulation and their impact on performance were studied on closed-loop sensorimotor experiments. The potential of deep reinforcement learning for target reaching affects object interaction, manipulation and grasping tasks and can contribute to adapt its execution to different situations. An active binocular DVS system is used in stereo mode is driven by micro saccades.  The SNN feedback information from the DVS vision system and from proprioception are coupled for executing reaching movements and in general for motion generation.

 Future work is related to an effective use of neuromorphic vision with emphasis to eye movement, micro saccades, visual affordance learning and visual prediction. Biomorphic navigation and mapping (BSLAM) requires episodic neural memories supported by multi-scale learning capabilities.

Prof. Dr Bernhard Eitel, Rector of Heidelberg University
Bernhard Eitel studied geography and German studies at Karlsruhe University (TH). After earning his doctorate and habilitating at the University of Stuttgart, the scientist accepted a professorship at the University of Passau in 1995. In 2001 he was appointed professor of physical geography at Heidelberg University after turning down appointments at the universities of Göttingen and Bayreuth. Prof. Eitel is a member of a number of academic organisations and received an honorary doctorate from the Comenius University in Bratislava (Slovakia) for his research in the field of geomorphology. Prior to his initial election to the post of Rector of Heidelberg University in 2007, Prof. Eitel was already involved in various areas of academic self-administration. From 2012 to 2014, he served as spokesperson for German U15, an association of research-intensive and internationally visible universities with medical faculties in Germany. Prof. Eitel has been chair of the Baden-Württemberg State Rectors’ Conference since the beginning of last year.

Welcome address

Lars Klüver has 30 years of experience in technology assessment, societal dialogue and engagement, and responsible research and innovation. He is director of the Danish Board of Technology. In the Human Brain Project he is deputy leader of the Ethics and Society sub-project, and leading the activities on Citizen Consultations and Stakeholder Engagement. In the next three years of the HBP he will be leading the Community Building, which will include creating sustainable collaboration between all types of actors for whom brain research matters.

Lecture title: Societal relations, neuroethics and inclusive community building

The HBP Ethics and Society activities ensure compliance with the rules and values in our societies. The EBRAINS Community will be developed to embrace such values by including stakeholder groups, interdisciplinarity and by having responsibility and societal benefits as central values for the community activities.

Dirk Pleiter, Prof. Dr., is leading the research group on "Application oriented technology development" at Jülich Supercomputing Centre and professor of physics at University of Regensburg. He has been involved in the Human Brain Project from its very start leading a pre-commercial procurement leading to two pilot HPC systems, which have been used for brain research. He was one of the founders of Fenix, a collaboration of European supercomputing centres for providing HPC, cloud and storage services. Since 2018 he acts as technical coordinator of the ICEI project, which led to a first implementation of the Fenix infrastructure.​

Petra Ritter holds a life time professorship for Brain Simulation at the Charité University Medicine Berlin and the Berlin Institute of Health. Ritter is renowned for her work in personalized brain simulation by integrating multimodal brain imaging and multi-scale computational modeling. She serves in the leadership of several consortia including VirtualBrainCloud, an EU consortium of 17 partner institutions and The Virtual Brain an international neuroinformatics platform. In the Human Brain project she is leading the Codesign Project ‘The Virtual Brain’.

Lecture title: The Virtual Brain Platform - Applications in medicine and research

Creating computer models of individual human brains and simulating them. This is what The Virtual Brain neuroinformatics platform does! We will be demonstrating brain simulations and explaining how they can help to understand brain function and dysfunction. Importantly we show how a patient can benefit from this tool.