Lecture | Chris Eliasmith | Building Brains from Bottom to Top

There has recently been an international surge of interest in building large brain models. The European Union's Human Brain Project (HBP) has received 1 billion euros worth of funding, and President Obama announced the Brain Initiative along with a similar level of funding. However the large scale models affiliated with both projects do not demonstrate how their generated complex neural activity relates to observable behaviour -- arguably the central challenge for neuroscience. I will present our recent work on large-scale brain modeling that is focussed on both biological realism and reproducing human behaviour. I will demonstrate how the model relates to both low-level neural data and high-level behavioural data. Finally, I will discuss applications of this research to understanding both the biological basis of cognition and building more advanced robots. [March 25, 2015]