The following is a guest blog post from CCC Vice Chair and Post Moore’s Law Computing Task Force Chair Mark Hill from University of Wisconsin-Madison and former CCC Chair and Artificial Intelligence Task Force Chair Greg Hager from Johns Hopkins University.  In a recent article, “Chips off the Old Block: Computers Are Taking Cues From Human Brains,” the New York Times highlighted the latest new wave of innovation in computer hardware, the foundation of Information Technology that has so altered our world. Like many generations of innovation before it, these innovations are being driven by the insatiable need for additional computing capacity, in this case due to the new demands of the […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has made 17 Next Generation Networks for Neuroscience (NeuroNex) awards to aid the research community as it pursues one of its grandest challenges: understanding the brain. These projects will support the development of innovative, accessible and shared capabilities and resources, as well as theoretical frameworks and computational modeling to advance neuroscience research. The overall goal of this activity is to establish a coherent national infrastructure to enhance our understanding of brain function across organizational levels and a diversity of species. NeuroNex is one element of Understanding the Brain, NSF’s multi-year effort to enable a scientific understanding of the full complexity of the brain. Nine of the new […]

The organizing committee for the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Nanotechnology-Inspired Information Processing Systems has released their workshop report. The workshop, held in September 2016, brought together over 40 leading researchers from the areas of computing, neuroscience, systems, architecture, integrated circuits, and nanoscience, to come up with new ideas for the future of information processing platforms on beyond-CMOS nanoscale technologies that can approach the energy efficiency and the decision‐making capacity of the human brain. The workshop report addresses the future of nanoscale process technologies within three application-driven platform-focused topic areas and discusses the current technologies, challenges, and research opportunities in each area. The topic areas are: cloud-based systems that provide software, platforms and infrastructure as […]

The National Institute of Health (NIH) just announced 2 new BRAIN Initiative Requests for Applications (RFAs). The applications are not just limited to neuroscientists, they are open to anyone addressing the goals of President Obama’s BRAIN Initiative. Check them out and consider applying! RFA-MH-17-250 (F32): a funding opportunity for individual postdoctoral fellows early in their postdoctoral training. We are encouraging applications from individuals who are just now wrapping up their PhD training.  Program point of contact – Nancy Desmond. Formal training in quantitative perspectives and analytical tools is expected to be an integral part of the proposed research training plan. Applications are encouraged in any research area that is aligned with […]

National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded researchers have more than doubled the knowledge of the functional areas of the human brain. NIH Director, Francis Collins, posted a Director’s Blog about a recent NIH funded study that was reported in the journal Nature, which brings the map of the human brain into much sharper focus. From the blog post: By combining multiple types of cutting-edge brain imaging data from more than 200 healthy young men and women, the researchers were able to subdivide the cerebral cortex, the brain’s outer layer, into 180 specific areas in each hemisphere. Remarkably, almost 100 of those areas had never before been described. This new high-resolution […]

On April 2, 2013, President Obama launched the Brain Research though Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative as a bold new research effort to revolutionize our understanding of the human mind and uncover new ways to treat, prevent, and cure brain disorders. The initiative is a joint program with funding through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the National Science Foundation (NSF). In December 2014, in conjunction with the NSF, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) held a workshop to bring together the Neuroscience and Computer Science communities to help create breakthrough technologies as a part of the BRAIN Initiative. Then in January of 2016, the CCC was […]