A recent article on the WSJ (In Search for Intelligence, a Silicon Brain Twitches) reviews the Blue Brain project based at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. The Blue Brian project, led for the last four years by Henry Markram, has focused in building a biologically accurate rat cortical column. Read the rest of this entry »

Some time ago, a professor at a British university once told me that the introduction of yearly 50 pound “top-up” fees would corrupt education. He reasoned that if students could not completely concentrate on their work without undue influence, e.g. worrying about making money to pay for their education, how could they possibly engaged in the unbiased learning experience of the university? To American ears this sounds ridiculous. Some students accumulate hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, and this professor is worried about his students paying 50 pounds a year!

I found the statement completely histrionic back then, but I’m starting to sympathize with him more and more these days. This has become especially acute since I left the holy order of philosophy for the decidedly greener pastures of computational neuroscience. Green seems pretty good to a former philosopher, but the closer I get to it the more I worry at times (as I am certainly wont to do!).  As with those 50 pounds and the undergrads, could the mighty green seriously warp the priorities of researchers?

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I recently saw a talk by a luminary, i.e. one of the few people you may have heard of, in computational neuroscience. It touched on issues of attention and object recognition, covering a good deal of theoretical and experimental ground. At least, the majority of the talk focused on how to mathematically model brain data, unifying neurobiological facts and behavioral data. This is the MO of computational neuroscience, all well and good. I started to worry when this particular luminary bragged about how much code was written for a particular simulation. Again, listing it is one thing, but this luminary bragged about it. You can write 10 trillion lines of Assembly and I will be suitably impressed at the ability of a graduate student to sit and write code for a 30 year PhD project. Just don’t expect everyone’s knees to buckle and accept that your simulation, by virtue of the size of its codebase, does anything meaningful.

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