EBRAINS-Italy will be the Italian node of the European distributed infrastructure of EBRAINS, which aims at enabling clinical and experimental activities in the health sector to adequately exploit the most advanced modelling, computation and data analysis technologies available in neurosciences.
The main objective is to bring together within a research infrastructure various groups with cross-sectoral competences in modelling, high performance computing and experimental/theoretical neuroscience operating in Italy, integrating their activities in order to ensure synergies and generate substantial progress in the production and dissemination of knowledge in the scientific, industrial and social fields throughout Italy.
The project results in terms of know-how will be made available through a single access point in order to strengthen the technology transfer and the development of new international research and development collaborations.
Politecnico will be part of the “Analysis, Modelling, and Simulation facilities and services” group that will play a decisive role in enabling EBRAINS-Italy to develop innovative technologies for the discovery and validation of new drugs and therapies, physical stimulation protocols for brain diseases, applications of digital twins, personalised and precision medicine, bio-inspired robotics, brain-machine interfaces and neuromorphic computing.
In detail, the main aim of Politecnico di Torino will be the creation of a Neuromorphic Computing Lab focused on the study, development and use of state-of-the-art neuromorphic technologies. The Neuromorphic Computing Lab will make two main contributions to the infrastructure:
- A state-of-the-art neuromorphic platform for the design and development of applications that exploit heterogeneous digital/neuromorphic information systems;
- A framework to support developers in the end-to-end engineering process of Spiking Neural Networks (SNN) simulations performed on neuromorphic devices. This framework will be designed to enable the simulation of SNN models observed in vivo and the development of neuromorphic Machine Learning algorithms to be used as tools to analyse the data produced by the project partners.
With these two components, the Neuromorphic Computing Lab will be able to develop new types of heterogeneous systems that support neuromorphic computing paradigms that can continuously interpret and learn from data and solve complex problems efficiently.
Total budget: Euro 22,370,240.00
Scientific coordinator at Politecnico di Torino: Enrico Macii - Inter-university Department of Territorial Science, Planning and Policy (DIST - Dipartimento Interateneo di Scienze, Progetto e Politiche del Territorio )
Politecnico di Torino budget: Euro 587,000.00