Representatives from the three most ambitious research projects of the European Union, the FET Flagships – Graphene Flagship, Human Brain Project and Quantum Flagship – reunite at the ICT 2018 Conference (Vienna, 4-6 December).

The ICT 2018 Conference on 4-6 December in Vienna is Europe’s largest ICT event, with a dedicated exhibition and special events on the digital transformation of society and industry. For the first time, all three of the EU’s FET Flagships – Graphene Flagship, Human Brain Project and Quantum Flagship – will be featured in the same place at once. Several media events and three neighboring exhibition booths with interactive demos invite to discover Europe’s Flagship Fleet.

A recently published paper on the neuroscience of drug addiction raises ethical and policy issues arising out of addiction. The paper concludes social and economic circumstances contribute towards the propensity of individuals to become addicted.

Data obtained within HBP’s brain atlas work has contributed to the discovery of a "short distance" brain connectivity deficit that is associated with a lack of social interaction and empathy.

"Getting to know our new collaborators personally definitely helped us to establish working cooperation”, Zdenek Straka, an early career researcher of the RobotBodySchema project, explained to FECYT, coordinator of the SCOPE project.

1 November 2018 marked the launch of the European Brain Council (EBC)-coordinated EU project The European Brain Research Area (EBRA). A project to streamline and better co-ordinate brain research across Europe while fostering global initiatives.

HBP Scientific Research Director Katrin Amunts held the first impulse statement on “AI in Science” in the Falling Walls Circle event held in Berlin on November 8th. 

In HBP,  the team of Gregoire Courtine studies basic mechanisms of electrical spinal cord stimulation in a virtual experiment setup on the Neurorobotics Platform. They also developed personalized computational models for each patient that guided the placement of the electrode arrays over the spinal cord.

Members of the International Brain Initiative (IBI) have met in La Jolla, California following the historic agreement to establish the IBI that was made on the 8 December 2017, in Canberra Australia. The meeting was attended by HBP’s leader of the Neuroinformatics Platform Prof. Jan Bjaalie.

From 6-7 February 2019, the 3: HBP Student Conference will take place at Ghent University, Belgium. This annual event, organised by early-career researchers for early-career researchers, aims to encourage collaboration and scientific exchange across the various research fields relevant to the Human Brain Project.The programme includes keynote lectures by distinguished scientists from within and outside the Human Brain Project, student presentations and poster sessions as well as social events.