EBRAINS at the ICNCE 2024 conference on neuromorphic computing

The event, organised by Forschungszentrum Jülich and RWTH Aachen, brought together over 600 people interested in discussing brain-inspired computing, computational neuroscience, artificial intelligence and related fields.

Participants had the opportunity to visit the EBRAINS booth and learn more about how the EBRAINS Open Science Tools and Services can power their research and how to get access to the neuromorphic compute systems on EBRAINS, SpiNNaker and BrainScaleS.

EBRAINS Germany informed scientists about the German node of the European brain research network and inspired them with hands-on examples on how to use the EBRAINS infrastructure.

Research powered by EBRAINS

Neuromorphic computing draws inspiration from the biological brain for the development of hardware and software, mimicking the energy efficiency of the human brain.

EBRAINS offers access to BrainScaleS and SpiNNaker, which are the largest neuromorphic systems in Europe, and enable high speed simulations or emulations of spiking neural networks.

During the scientific programme of the ICNCE 2024, EBRAINS researchers presented recent developments in this field. Elias Arnold, a researcher at the Heidelberg University and a member of the team working with BrainScaleS, presented their progress on concepts designed to meet the rapidly growing demand for hardware resources needed to train and run larger deep spiking neural networks with higher energy efficiency.

Advances in neuromorphic computing and AI can be informed by neuroscientific modelling and theory. A number of presentations contributed new impulses to this. Research supported by the Human Brain Project – the EU-funded 10-year project that created the EBRAINS Research Infrastructure – was also presented at the event. Paul Haider, (University of Bern) introduced a computational neuro-inspired framework to provide a solution to a challenge in machine learning, the so-called “spatiotemporal credit assignment problem”, which relates to determining the actions that lead to a certain outcome.

EBRAINS research gets best poster award

EBRAINS researchers at the ICNCE 2024 exhibited posters on a range of topics, including cortical microcircuits, workflow descriptions, and state-dependent neural dynamics, among others.

The poster “State-dependent neural manifolds, correlations and timescales in macaque cortex and in spiking neural networks”, by EBRAINS researcher Aitor Morales-Gregorio (Forschungszentrum Jülich), won the first prize at the ICNCE Best Poster Awards. The study brings new insights into the mechanisms that enable arousal state changes in the brain.

Anno Kurth (Forschungszentrum Jülich) presented a new model reconstructing 1mm3 of mouse visual areas, based on electron-microscopy data of brain tissue, in comparison with a model based on light-microscopy data. The new model exhibits cortex-like activity more strongly.

In his poster, Cristiano A. Köhler (Forschungszentrum Jülich) proposes a framework for semantically-enriched description of analysis of experimental electrophysiology data or equivalent data by neural simulations. One of the aims is to improve reproducibility and FAIRness of simulations and analysis.