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.
Contacts
- Kathinka Evers, Professor of Philosophy
- Arleen Salles, Senior researcher, Deputy leader of the RRI workpackage
- Michele Farisco, Postdoc
- Manuel Guerrero, Researcher
- Karl Sallin, MD, PhD student
- Josepine Fernow, Communications manager
- Anna Holm, Communications officer
- Pär Segerdahl, Associate Professor & Editor of the Ethics Blog
PhD projects in the HBP
Neuroethics & Neurophilsophy
Any attempt at understanding how the mind and the brain work comes with a set of philosophical, ethical and social issues.
Neuroethics & RRI
Conceptual analysis
Answers to questions about transferring brain knowledge to medicine, law, philosophy, and health and social policy.
Pervasive refusal syndrome
Karl Sallin is studying pervasive refusal syndrome as a disorder of consciousness.
Neuroethics & Philosophy of the Brain
The CRB neuroethics research team is an international, multi-disciplinary group. Our backgrounds allow us to approach these issues from theoretical, philosophical, social, bio-political and clinical perspectives. We collaborate closely with neuroscientists to understand the ethical and philosophical questions that neuroscience brings. In this report, we provide a summary of our research. The report was updated in November 2016. We are planning an update in the autumn 2020.
