By Paweł Świeboda, CEO of EBRAINS and Director General of the Human Brain Project.

The latest edition of the International School of Brain Cells & Circuits “Camillo Golgi”, organised by scientists at the Human Brain Project, concluded on Saturday 3 November. The school was hosted at the Ettore Majorana Foundation and Centre for Scientific Culture in the small Sicilian town of Erice, where high profile scientific summits have been taking place since 1963 in four reformed monasteries across the town. This year marks the 7th edition of the school, which featured more than 80 participants and dozens of talks, lessons, poster sessions and for the first time workshops and hands-on activities.

Researchers from the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) supported by the Human Brain Project (HBP) were able for the first time to identify the origin, intranuclear distribution and size of all types of axon terminals present in a cognitive nucleus of the thalamus.

Human Brain Project researchers from University of Oslo have reviewed the current state of atlas-based data integration for mapping the connections and architecture of the rodent brain. These interactive, 3-dimensional atlases provide a standardized representation of anatomical location and connectivity between brain regions. When publicly available and enriched with metadata and analysis tools, these resources form the basis for a shared research language accessible to the whole scientific community.

Artificial intelligence can both help and harm. How can we weigh the benefits, for example, by reducing human error, against the costs, such as the introduction of algorithmic bias? A new book offers tools to help manage the ethical challenges brought on by the increased use of AI, offering both case studies and proposing case-specific solutions to address discrimination, privacy, surveillance capitalism, manipulation, right to life, liberty and security, dignity and how to use AI for good.

Prof. Jean-Pierre Changeux, a lead scientist in the HBP, will receive the Erasmus Medal of the Academia Europaea.

A new research article from the Neurocomputation Unit of the department of Brain and Behavioural Sciences, in collaboration with the Brain Connectivity Centre of the Mondino Foundation, has just been published in Nature Communications Biology, providing a new model- based ground truth about organization and functioning of the cerebellar circuit.
 

Organised by the Society for Neuroscience (SfN), the event Neuroscience 2022 took place from 12–16 November 2022 in San Diego, CA and online. During these five days, scientists from all around the world congregated to discover new ideas, share their research, and meet the top researchers in the field.

On International Students Day we would like to highlight the activities of the Human Brain Project Education Programme in 2022.

The 3rd version of the position paper on the vision for the coming decade of digital brain research has just been published. Researchers worldwide are invited to contribute to the paper by submitting comments or adding their names to the list of supporters.