The Amazing Human Brain Project

It was great pleasure to moderate a session with Cristoph Ebell at our PMI event on November 2 in Lausanne. Christoph is Executive Director of the Human Brain Project, European-wide initiative to provide the infrastructure and software tools necessary for decoding and understanding of the human brain. The interest was considerable, since this is one of the most important scientific projects in the world managed from Switzerland.

The Human Brain Project consists of 12 subprojects, driven concurrently in around 120 different institutions in more than 20 different countries. Christoph Ebell was talking about the project objectives, challenges and lessons learned, and how the collaboration stimulated by this project will create numerous innovation opportunities in neurorobotics, neuroinformatics and medicine.

The overall team consists of over 500 people from neuroscience, engineering and IT. The massive data and complexity of the mathematical models require ever-growing super-computing power. So, the day-to-day management, governance, technical and scientific leadership, and communication requirements are simply massive. We’ve learned how to deal with such challenges using some new concepts like science diplomacy, as a way of communicating with stakeholders, and co-design as a way to integrate the distributed engineering of innovative technologies.

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Excellent atmosphere and after-event networking with more than 60 participants !

Sasha Lazarevic, November 2016