Hemispheres of the Mind

Hemispheres of the Mind is a collaboration between the EPFL Laboratory of Experimental Museology and the EPFL Blue Brain Project for the ArtLab Infinity Room II 2019. 

A collaboration between Cyrille Favreau (Blue Brain Project),  Sarah Kenderdine (eM+ EPFL) and Peter Morse for ArtLab Infinity Room II 2019 celebrating 50 years of Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne.

Special thanks to Grigori Chevtchenko for the fisheye camera implementation, and Paweł Podhajski for allowing the deployment of Brayns on the Blue Brain Supercomputer.


Audio Production by Peter Morse and Cathie Travers.
Music by Kai Engel & Cathie Travers

#epfl #project #laboratory #bluebrainproject #brain #sciart

Results of months of work at the Blue Brain Project

Journal for Neuroscience cover published!

Making an image of the brain always is a challenge. The idea behind the cover image is to pay tribute to the amazing work initiated by Camillo Golgi back in the late 19th century. His discovery of a staining technique called black reaction changed the way one could visualize brain structures. Recent studies have shown that the aesthetic of images representing data visualization in neuro-science plays a significant role in the way those image are understood. In the last years, computer technologies have improved dramatically, together with the field of computational neuro-science. Thanks to advanced computer graphics techniques, it is now possible to reconstruct realistic shapes of neurons from a set of points and radii describing the structure of the cell. Many of those data sets for single neurons can be found on the web. Combining them together and placing them in space makes it a simple way to imagine what regions of the brain could look like if they were to be seen using Golgi’s technique. In the near future, it seems clear that realistic, physically based rendering of in-silico data will become a necessary tool to understand how the brain functions. But if those new tools are very promising, one should not forget the work of the pioneers, and this is what this cover image is all about.

Celebrating the beauty of the brain

So... I played, and I won :) I somehow became the winner of the NeuroArt contest for December 2018, which is great

I am extremely happy to be one the winners of the NeuroArt contest for December 2018.

Making an image of the brain always is a challenge. The idea behind the cover image is to pay tribute to the amazing work initiated by Camillo Golgi back in the late 19^th century. His discovery of a staining technique called black reaction changed the way one could visualize brain structures. Recent studies have shown that the aesthetic of images representing data visualization in neuroscience plays a significant role in the way those image are understood.

In the last years, computer technologies have improved dramatically, together with the field of computational neuroscience. Thanks to advanced computer graphics techniques, it is now possible to reconstruct realistic shapes of neurons from a set of points and radii describing the structure of the cell. Many of those datasets for single neurons can be found on the web. Combining them together and placing them in space makes it a simple way to imagine what regions of the brain could look like if they were to be seen using Golgi’s technique.

In the near future, it seems clear that realistic, physically based rendering of in-silico data will become a necessary tool to understand how the brain functions.

But if those new tools are very promising, one should not forget the work of the pioneers, and this is what this cover image is all about.

Full stack/frontend software engineer wanted!

Your mission if you accept it

The EPFL Blue Brain Project (BBP), situated on the Campus Biotech in Geneva, Switzerland, applies advanced neuroinformatics, data analytics, high-performance computing and simulation-based approaches to the challenge of understanding the structure and function of the mammalian brain in health and disease. The BBP provides the community with regular releases of data, models and tools to accelerate neuroscience discovery and clinical translation through open science and global collaboration.

We are looking for a self motivated full stack/frontend software engineer (W/M) to join our team and help us with the development of our visualization tools.

You will be working in a dynamic team with highly skilled software engineers and our goal is to aid scientists in visualizing and understanding their (neuroscientific) data.

Main duties and responsibilities include :

Your responsibility will be to develop new features for our current interactive 3D viewer Brayns (on the frontend) and maintain existing ones, and to drive the development of our new hub application where the scientists can manage their data visualizations.

 

More information available here.