Blue Brain – An emerging Artificial Intelligence

53

The term, Blue Brain is digitally reconstructing and simulation of the brain. Focusing on more details, it’s trying to reverse engineer to the human brain and recreate it at the cellular level inside a computer simulation. Even after the death of a person, he will not lose the knowledge, intelligence, personalities, feelings, and memories of that man, that can be used to develop the human society.

The goal of the Blue Brain Project is to build biologically detailed digital reconstructions and simulations of the rodent, and ultimately the human brain. With the ever-growing and dynamic Technology, IBM is now in research to create a virtual brain, called “Blue brain”.

Research Field:

Blue Brain Neuron
Neuron

The research involves studying slices of living brain tissue using microscopes and patch clamp electrodes. Data is collected about all different neuron types. This data is used to build biologically realistic models of neurons and networks of neurons in the cerebral cortex. However, the simulations carried out on a Blue Gene supercomputer built by IBM thus, named as “Blue Brain”. The simulation software is based around Michael Hines’s NEURON; in addition to other custom-built components. IBM is now in research to create the blue brain. If possible, this would be the first virtual brain of the world.

IBM First ever Project on Blue Brain
Blue Brain IBM project

IBM, in partnership with scientists at Switzerland’s Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne’s  Brain and Mind Institute, will begin simulating the brain’s biological systems and output the data as a working 3-dimensional model that will recreate the high-speed electrochemical interactions that take place within the brain’s interior.Moreover, these also include cognitive functions such as language, learning, perception, and memory in addition to brain malfunction such as psychiatric disorders like depression and autism.

From there, the modeling will expand to other regions of the brain and, if successful, shed light on the relationships between genetic, molecular and cognitive functions of the brain.

With all the theoretical projections and implementations, this would be the first virtual brain of the world. Every two week a column model is run. The simulations reproduce observations seen in living neurons. Emergent properties need larger and larger networks. The plan is to build a generalized simulation tool, one that makes it easy to build circuits.

As on 2017, it is important to understand the need and complexity for the research as the simulations suggest that reconstructions can accurately reproduce many phenomena reported in earlier laboratory experiments – without changing the limits of the reconstruction.

Digital reconstructions refined, expanded and validated for new kinds of experiments; have become an ever more valuable resource for neurosciences research, allowing experiments and providing insights that would not be possible with alternative approaches.

Functioning of Blue Brain:

  • Sensory Input: Receives input data such as sound, image and much more through the sensory cell.
  • Interpretation: The received signal interpret by defining the states of neurons in the brain.
  • Motor Output: Receives of electric responses from the brain to do any action.

Hardware and Software Requirements:

  • A Super Computer
  • Memory with having a large capacity
  • Processor with having large processing power
  • A program to convert the electric impulses from the brain to input signal, which received by the computer and vice versa.
  • Very powerful Nanobots to act as the interface between the natural brain and the computer.
  • The Blue Brain has some 8,000 processors which map one or two simulated brain neurons to each processor, making the computer a replica of 10,000 neurons.

You might like the following posts:

Artificial Intelligence and its Future

Like us on Facebook. 🙂