BLUE BRAIN

Sheetal KadamMounika KasaramSubiya Nadar

Contents

I. IntroductionII. What is blue brainIII. Building virtual brainIV. Brain SimulationV. Gathering informationVI. SuccessVII.Motivation

INTRODUCTION

In 2009, neuroscientist Henry Markram publicly announced that he seeks to reverse-engineer a human brain with digital simulations of all the physical properties of every neuron, powered by IBM Blue Gene supercomputers, by 2020.

WHAT IS BLUE BRAIN?

• First virtual brain• Human brain as computer simulation• Think, response, take decision, and keep

anything in memory

Building virtual brain

1. Data acquisition2. Simulation3. Visualization of results

DATA ACQUISITION

• Measurement of shapes and electrical activity of neurons

• Translation into mathematical algorithms

• Generation of biologically-realistic virtual neurons

SIMULATION• NEURON• Written in C, C++, and FORTRAN

SIMULATION

• Synthesizing virtual cells

• Simulation if every single protein

• Building network skeleton

VIRTUALIZATION• RTNeuron• Written in C++ and OpenGL• Takes the output simulations in NEURON and

renders them in 3D

Brain Simulation

Natural Brain Simulated Brain

Input Through the natural neurons

Through the silicon chip or artificial neurons

Interpretation By different states of the neurons in the brain

By a set of bits in the set of register

Brain SimulationNatural Brain Simulated

Brain

Output Through the natural neurons.

Through the silicon chip .

Processing Through arithmetic and logical calculations

Through arithmetic and logical calculation and artificial intelligence

Memory Through permanent states of neurons

Through Secondary memory

How to gather information?

• Nanobots• Monitoring activity & structure of CNS

Success

• Successful simulation of rat cortical column

• Generation of brain’s building blocks • 100 cortical columns made by Aug 2012

Motivation

• Brain disease treatments• Curiosity about consciousness • Integration of all neuroscientific research• Artificial intelligence

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