HBP Innovation Awards
 

Winners of 2023 were annouced at the Summit, our warmest congratulations to Prof. Pieter Roelfsema and his team for the work on “The Brain Prosthesis for the Blind” and Prof. Philippe Ryvlin and Prof. Yannis Ioannidis and their teams for the work on the “Medical Informatics Platform”.

Read the news here.

Although winners will not receive a cash reward, this prize will give the innovator the opportunity to:

• get a printed diploma and 3D object with the title of the innovation and name and affiliation of the winner.
• include a description of the technology in the Innovation Newsletter, both in printed form and on the HBP web site.
• record an interview where the winner can explain the motivation and interest in pursuing the innovation activities.
• inform the European Commission, via the Project Officer, about the prize and to include it as relevant in the reporting procedures of innovation in the HBP.
• participate in one special session of the HBP Summit where all prized innovators will receive public recognition, with the participation of the HBP CEO, SIB Chair and the EC.

The HBP Innovation Awards, conceived and designed by the Innovation Team, were endorsed by DIR December 2020, and are implemented according to the following lines:

• Awards will be delivered every six months in 2021 and 2022 (four awards in total in SGA3).
• Awards will be pre-selected by the Innovation team in coordination with the WP Project Managers, based on a set of innovation-related criteria and the exploitation potential of the HBP results.
• Three ranked candidates with an explanatory dossier will be proposed to the DIR every six months by the Innovation team.
• The DIR will select one of them as the “Innovation Award” of that semester.

The Innovation team will support the Communication team to disseminate the awards with videos of the interviews made to the prized innovators and their team, thus the awarded innovation will be widely explained to media.

To propose a candidate all is needed is to fill in this document and send it to innovation@humanbrainproject.eu (candidates must be HBP results funded in SGA3 or HBP Partnering Projects).

 

The first Innovation Award (first semester 2021) was granted to Viktor Jirsa and the Virtual Epileptic Patient (VEP) team. 

Our warmest congratulations to Viktor Jirsa and all the VEP Team for the outstanding work made on VEP in the HBP from the innovation perspective.

We have interviewed Viktor Jirsa on the occasion of the award, you can read the interview in our Innovation Newsletter.

Here you can watch an interview with Viktor Jirsa and Jean Marc Ferrier, CEO of VB-Tech (VB-Tech for Virtual Brain Technologies).
 

The second Innovation Award was granted to Marcello Massimini and the PCI team from the University of Milan and the Coma Science Group of the University of Liège for their work on the Perturbational Complexity Index (PCI). Congratulations to all of them for the great work! 

The innovation developed in the context of the HBP measures the complexity of electroencephalographic (EEG) responses to transcraneal magnetic stimulation (TMS); it showed a remarkable sensitivity in detecting minimal signs of consciousness. 

You can find out more about this exciting technology in the interview with Marcello Massimini here.