During the 2023 Human Brain Project Summit in Marseille, focus areas and driving principles of the Human Brain Project were reflected in the works that young scientists have brought to the poster session.

A major theme in the more than 170 posters displayed was a sense of grassroot-driven, community-oriented, problem-solving. Many researchers have built or refined tools and methodologies to make their work better, and now they want to share them with their peers in other institutions. From developing data-moving services to solve the non-trivial issue of transferring terabytes of data from one supercomputing center to another, to data curation (among the winners of best abstract award) and metadata projects (OpenMINDS), posters at the HBP summit were filled with links and QR codes inviting other researchers to try the newly invented tools on their own.

“Through the HBP, we have been given access to a lot of data and tools, and now we want to find our own solutions to put them to the best use, to make them fit our research questions,” says Christoph Huettl from Karl-Franzens Universität Graz, who has devised a system to categorise parameters used in different brain simulation softwares and now ties them back to a common biological meaning and function.

A lot of the research displayed was enabled by the EBRAINS research infrastructure, which has provided extensive datasets, tractography data and a simulation environment, in which to test, in one example, the evolution of emergent swarm intelligence. 

Another recurring theme was the multi-scale approach: many young researchers are drawn to the difficult endeavour of analysing, representing and simulating the human brain at multiple levels of scale and complexity. 

You can access the full list of poster abstracts here.