The Human Brain Project

The Human Brain Project (HBP) is a European Community Flagship Project of Information and Computing Technologies (ICT) within the framework of the Future Emerging Technologies (FET) vision. It is coordinated from École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland.

The project engages over 100 research groups in and outside Europe. It is organized around three complementary research areas:

Future Neuroscience
Future Medicine and
Future Computing

Aims of the Human Brain Project

The HBP aims to achieve a fuller and more integrated understanding of the brain and translate it into medicine and technology. The project has involved the development of supercomputing technologies to federate and manage data describing the brain and its diseases, to integrate it in computer models and simulations of the brain, to identify patterns and organizational principles apparent when the data is gathered, and to identify gaps to be filled by new experiments. One of its goals is the creation and operation of an ICT infrastructure for neuroscience and brain related research in medicine and computing recently launched under the name of EBRAINS.

The HBP has the following main objectives:

Create and operate a European scientific Research Infrastructure for brain research, cognitive neuroscience, and other brain-inspired sciences
Gather, organize, and disseminate data describing the brain and its diseases
Simulate the brain
Build multi-scale scaffold theory and models for the brain
Develop brain-inspired computing, data analytics and robotics
Ensure that the HBP's work is undertaken responsibly and that it benefits society.

CRB in the Human Brain Project

CRB is part of HBP through professor Kathinka Evers who has led the philosophical research within the HBP and been a member of the HBP's Science and Infrastructure Board until June 2020.