Digital Brain Project

Following the conclusion of the Brain/MINDS project (2014-2024), a new six-year program Multidisciplinary Frontier Brain and Neuroscience Discoveries (Brain/MINDS 2.0) has started.

A remarkable feature of this program is that the Digital Brain 「デジタル脳」plays a central role in integrating structural and dynamic brain data from multiple species for understanding brain functions and tackling neuropsychiatric disorders.

(from MEXT FY2024 budget request p. 74) 

RIKEN and seven partner institutions including OIST, ATR and Kyoto University were selected as the Core Organization. In addition, 97 Subprojects for the priority research topics were accepted, with 16 focusing on Digital Brain development.

OIST Neural Computation Unit (prof. Kenji Doya) will take a leading role in developing the software tools for constructing digital brains and their use cases for understanding brain functions, such as reinforcement learning and Bayesian inference, and prediction, intervention, and prevention of neuropsychiatric disorders.

This ambitious project requires fresh talents from math, computation, AI and brain sciences, as well as broad international collaborations. We have postdoc and technical positions available. If you are interested, please apply by this application form.

To facilitate discussions about how to build and to utilize digital brains, we organize Digital Brain Seminars. A talk introducing the Digital Brain concept is available on YouTube.

We are also organizing Digital Brain Workshop on September 19-21 in Tokyo.