This project will support the workshop called "EMBS Forum on Grand Challenges in Biomedical Engineering - Engineering the Future of Brain Science" The Forum workshop will review progress made, and determine challenges facing the scientific community in understanding the brain at a systems level in the next decade. The Forum will address the following questions:
How neural activities at the cellular or sub-cellular levels contribute to the system-level brain functions; How can we image the brain with high spatial and temporal resolution by developing new imaging modalities or new informatics methods to accomplish similar goals via integrating multimodal imaging data; How can we understand the network behavior of neuronal networks consisting of millions of neurons; and how can we interface the brain with environment and restore impaired brain functions.
The workshop will have the following specific topics: Neural Informatics, Neural Circuits, Neural Connectomics, Neural Imaging, Neural Interfacing, Neural Prosthesis, Neural Computation, and Neural Sensing.
The Forum Workshop will bring together leading scholars, government officials and representatives from industry to discuss and identify critical issues and challenges facing the biomedical engineering community and larger society. The results of the Forum will provide further guidance to the scientific community, government and industry with regard to how should we engineer the future of brain science. The Forum workshop will include identification of important challenges for the larger society, broad dissemination of the forum outcome via EMBS network and media coverage, publication of special issue in international scholarly journal, and strong international participation.
