Blue Brain Project
The project was founded in May 2005 by the Brain Mind Institute of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland.
The project was headed by the founding director Henry Markram—who also launched the European Human Brain Project—and was co-directed by Felix Schürmann, Adriana Salvatore and Sean Hill.
There were a number of collaborations, including the Cajal Blue Brain, which is coordinated by the Supercomputing and Visualization Center of Madrid (CeSViMa), and others run by universities and independent laboratories.
[11] Also in 2015, scientists at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) developed a quantitative model of the previously unknown relationship between the neurons and the astrocytes.
The additional layer of neuron and glial cells is being added to Blue Brain Project models to improve functionality of the system.
The project's director suggested that the difficulty of understanding the brain is partly because the mathematics usually applied for studying neural networks cannot detect that many dimensions.
He also mentioned that the model had become too heavy on the supercomputers they were using at the time, and that they were consequently exploring methods in which every neuron could be represented as an artificial neural network (see citation for details).
The EPFL bought the Blue Gene computer at a reduced cost because it was still a prototype and IBM was interested in exploring how applications would perform on the machine.
[37][38] In 2016, the HBP underwent a restructuring with resources originally earmarked for brain simulation redistributed to support a wider array of neuroscience research groups.
Since then, scientists and engineers from the Blue Brain Project have contributed to various aspects of the HBP, including the Neuroinformatics, EBRAINS, Neurorobotics, and High-Performance Computing Platforms.
[43] The film covers the "shifting goals and landmarks"[44] of the Blue Brain Project as well as the drama, "In the end, this isn’t about science.
