Press Release 10 October 2018

The SCOPE project support for HBP Partnering Projects and the benefits of the HBP partnering environment will be promoted at the booth number 8 of the exhibition area during the Open Day of the HBP Summit 2018.

October 11, 2018. The SCOPE project (Support and Coordination of the Partnering Environment for FET Flagships) aims to answer the challenge of coordinating and building the partnering environment for the two Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) Flagships, Graphene (GF) and the Human Brain Project (HBP), to ensure that their visionary and highly ambitious goals are achieved. Partnering Projects and Associated Members are an important mechanism of community building and participation, representing a unique opportunity to complement the results generated by the HBP Core projects.

FECYT (Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology) is the coordinator and neutral mediator between those responsible for promoting and strengthening relationships within this heterogeneous scientific community in both FET Flagships, through its partners in SCOPE: EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne), which holds the link with the HBP, and ESF (European Science Foundation), the link with the GF.

4 researchers from HBP Partnering Projects are benefiting from the SCOPE support to attend the HBP Summit 2018

Alberto Antonietti and Alice Geminiani are researchers of the CerebNEST project in the University Politecnico di Milano (Italy) that is providing important advancements to cerebro-cerebellar circuits functional modelling, eventually integrating the PyNEST codes into the virtual mouse robot. This project is currently collaborating with UNIPV and EPFL to develop cerebellar models and is elaborating the strategies for reconnecting it to the model brain of the virtual mouse robot. They are actually implementing several strategic aspects of HBP, especially with DTU University, a fruitful collaboration which is still ongoing, linking SP6 and SP10 activities. CerebNEST will participate in the Science Market of the Open Day by showing two demos about the integration of models of the cerebellum to control robots. They will show how the neurorobotic platform developed within the HBP can provide a useful tool to create virtual experiments with a variety of robots, challenging the brain models in different tasks. 

Jiri Stepanovsky and Zdenek Straka, researchers of the RobotBodySchema project in the Czech Technical University (Prague), will also attend the Summit. Thanks to the travel and registration fee grants awarded by SCOPE, they will network with the HBP Neurorobotics Platform developers to discuss the possibility of artificial touch emulation in connection with their research. They are in need of first-hand data from the neurosciences related to body representations and may provide in turn a robotic test-bed for hypotheses and mechanisms. Their work will facilitate the embedding of the brain simulation into a closed sensorimotor loop, through instantiation in a humanoid robot with similar morphology and sensorimotor capacities to humans. 

The Partnering Projects representative will attend the HBP Scientific and Infrastructure Board meeting

Luc Gentet, the PPs representative who was appointed by the HBP Stakeholder Board last year, a researcher at the PP CANON  at the INSERM (France), will also attend the Summit, thanks to the travel and registration fee grants offered by SCOPE. Specially he will represent the HBP partnering environment at the HBP Scientific and Infrastructure Board meeting. He will also present the current status at the FLAG-ERA II meeting on October 16th.  

Grants to support research mobility and integration within the HBP

SCOPE currently has more than 30 financial grants available with an approximate budget of € 50,000 for financing expenses linked to travelling to congresses, workshops or meetings organized by HBP, as well as visits to laboratories by research personnel.

Support for the communication of research results

SCOPE also aims to increase the visibility of the successes achieved by the HPB Partnering Projects and the economic and social benefits of their work.

To accomplish this, FECYT has the participation of SINC, its scientific news agency, which deals with the communication of the results of the leading research of the 26 projects and institutions associated with HBP. So far, FECYT has written 11 news articles and interviews that have been published in the communication channels of HBP (website, social networks, newsletters and corporate reports).

The SCOPE project also disseminates the collaborative activity that is under way between the researchers of HBP and the Partnering Projects through news published on the HBP website.

Authorship: Sara García-Rodríguez, FECYT 

More information:

Sara García-Rodríguez 
Project manager and responsible for the communication and dissemination of the SCOPE project

scope_project@fecyt.es 

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www.instagram.com/scope_project/