The 2015 Brain Informatics and Health Conference: Big Data for Smart Brain

For the first time, the strengths, weaknesses, missed opportunities and current dangers of large scale informatics approaches to brain research will be discussed at the 2015 Brain Informatics and Health Conference in London.

As part of the conference, Sarah Caddick, Senior Advisor for Neuroscience at the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, will be joined by a selection of world leaders in brain research, including Allan Jones (Chief Executive Officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science) and Karlheinz Meier (Professor at Universität Heidelberg) on a panel that will look at national and international projects to explore how the exponential increase in brain research, and hence data, is going to allow science to fully understand the complexities of the human brain.

“Mapping brain activity will produce nearly as much data as the Large Hadron Collider,” says Yike Guo, a general chair of the 2015 Brain Informatics and Health Conference and the director of Data Science Institute of Imperial College. “Brain research is now becoming one of the most challenging data science applications due to large-scale neural activity measurement gaining rapidly in importance. This conference is the first international conference focusing on the data challenge in brain research”.

BIH 2015 will bring together people who are doing cutting edge research in the field of Brain Informatics. Researchers and practitioners from neuroscience, cognitive science, computer science, data science, and neuroimaging technologies will explore the fundamental roles, interactions, and practical impact of Brain Informatics.

Through a series of keynote speeches, panel discussions and presentations, BIH’15 will focus on informatics for brain science, human behaviour and brain health by addressing big data approaches to both the brain and behaviour, with a strong emphasis on emerging trends of big data analysis and management technology for BI and real-world applications for brain and mental health. The full schedule is available.

Highlights includes keynote speeches by David C. Van Essen on the Human Connectome Project, which aims to provide an unparalleled compilation of neural data; Karlheinz Meier on the Human Brain Project, the biggest human brain research initiative in the world; and Allan Jones on the vision of Allen Institute.

There will also be a feature presentation by Dr Barbara Sahakian on the impact of neuroscience on society, and a series of presentations on decoding the brain, brain signals, connectomics, informatics and more.

The conference will be held at the Royal Geographical Society in South Kensington, London, from Sunday 30 August until Wednesday 2 September. Full details can be found online. The event is sponsored by NeuroPro, IBM, EPSRC, The Human Brain Project, Baidu, Imperial College and others.