MICrONS

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) MICrONS program (Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks) is a five-year project with the goal of Reverse engineering one cubic millimeter — spanning many petabytes of volumetric data — of a rodent's brain tissue and use insights from its study to improve machine learning and artificial intelligence.[1][2] The program is part of the White House BRAIN Initiative.[1][2]

Teams

The program is managed by Jacob Vogelstein of IARPA, and has set up three independent teams, each of which will take a different approach towards the goal. The teams are led by David Cox of Harvard University, Tai Sing Lee of Carnegie Mellon University, and Andreas Tolias of the Baylor College of Medicine.[1][2]

Technology and infrastructure for storing petabyte-scale volumetric data were developed by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab.[3]

Approach

The part of the brain chosen for the project is part of the visual cortex, chosen as a representative of a task – visual perception – that is easy for animals and human beings to perform, but has turned out to be extremely difficult to emulate with computers.[1][2]

Cox’s team is attempting to build a three dimensional mapping of the actual neural connections, based on fine electron micrographs.[2] Lee's team is taking a DNA barcoding approach, in attempt to map the brain circuits by barcode-labelling of each neuron, and cross-synapse barcode connections.[1] Tolias’s team is taking a data-driven approach, assuming the brain creates statistical expectations about the world it sees.[2]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 Cepelewicz, Jordana (2016-03-08). "The U.S. Government Launches a $100-Million "Apollo Project of the Brain"". Scientific American. Retrieved 2016-03-12.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Emily, Singer (2016-04-06). "Mapping the Brain to Build Better Machines". Quanta Magazine. Retrieved 2017-07-03.
  3. ↑ "BossDB: A scalable, cloud-native volumetric database". July 21, 2018.
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