Carboncopies Research¶
At Carboncopies, we're conducting various different types of research. Please see the list below and feel free to get involved!
Whole Brain Emulation Challenge¶
About¶
The Whole Brain Emulation (WBE) Challenge will rapidly accelerate progress towards WBE through a series of challenges and prizes designed to focus, quantify, and grow the structure-to-function field. Through rigorous validation metrics and performance scores, we can determine what methods work best and provide debugging feedback where they go wrong.
Impact¶
Conversion of brain data to working emulations (operational models that satisfy WBE criteria) is almost non-existent. This ‘Translation’ from data to model parameters is the final step to end-to-end examples of brain emulation. End-to-end examples will cause explosive growth in the field, as more people see the real and immense potential of the technology. Unfortunately, Translation is very hard, because evaluating how well a Translation method works is very difficult without a known correct result, i.e. without fully known ground-truth.
Therefore, we propose the WBE challenge - directly addressing these issues. Challenge data sets with fully understood images (e.g. ImageNet) were critical to the rapid development of computer vision. Our generated virtual brain samples containing a fully understood functional neuronal network allow us to apply validation metrics based on rigorous success criteria. With that, we can score the performance of an attempted translation from virtual brain data to a running emulation, and provide precise feedback about errors made.
Our challenge will encourage friendly academic competition within the field, driving innovation by setting clearly defined goals and rewards. With each iteration of the challenge, we create more-realistic and complex datasets that build participants up to the real-deal. This step-wise approach would allow participants to systematically debug and improve their methods, further accelerating their development.
BrainGenix Platform¶
About¶
The BrainGenix initiative exists to create and maintain a comprehensive software platform specifically designed to enable and accelerate WBE research.
Impact¶
Currently there are no existing platforms designed to address the interdisciplinary challenges presented by Whole Brain Emulation research. The BrainGenix platform seeks to change that by providing extensive libraries, tools, and other software needed to rapidly test and develop different aspects of WBE research.
Currently, BrainGenix is being developed to support the WBE Challenge, which requires both high-performance simulation of large-scale compartmental neuronal networks and a highly-realistic virtual scan data acquisition system. Many of these tasks are not trivial computationally, which only adds to the difficulty in conducting WBE research.
We seek to change that by taking the computational complexity out of the equation - our platform focuses on being fast and reliable, removing the need for researchers to worry about making code scale.
Ethics Framework¶
Info
Description coming soon!