Dear friends, fellow thinkers and colleagues,
On October 14 neuroscientist Dr. Randal Koene (USA) will give a lecture in Moscow about recent scientific discoveries in the field of neuroscience which will ultimately enable the complete emulation of human brains. Special attention will be given to neuroprostheses.
The live webcast of the lecture will be available on the www.2045.com site.
Join us on October 14th. The webcast starts 19:00 (Moscow time).
English language
Dr. Randal Koene: Some of the most important advances in neuroscience and neural engineering that will completely alter the landscape of medicine and our life expectations have gone almost unnoticed and little reported in the media, even though the pace of development makes clear that this is in fact the decade or even the century of the brain. Cognitive neuroprosthesis, the ability to identify the function of a specific piece of the brain, to create a prosthetic device that carries out precisely the same function, and to successfully replace the biological original with the neuroprosthetic device is the milestone in those advances. That milestone was achieved by Ted Berger's lab at USC. I will explain its near-term and long-term implications.
I will describe the technology roadmap and the ongoing projects that lead from such a small-scale prosthesis to neuroprostheses for all parts of the brain, so-called whole brain emulation. The process
demands both identification of the connections between all parts (connectomics) and functional characterization of each part.
Presently, and within the next few years we are witnessing the development of the neuroscience tools that enable high resolution brain-machine interfaces and therefore the necessary functional recording. These tools are as necessary and as powerful for neuroscientists and neural engineers as the invention of powerful telescopes was for astronomers. For the vision of the 2045 Initiative, whole brain emulation means the ability to move from biology to a completely nonbiological carrier, the Avatar C concept.
BIO
Dr. Randal A. Koene
Neuroengineering Pioneer
Computational Neuroscien- tist, science curator in the whole brain emulation field, pioneering development of substrate-independent minds.
Dr. Koene has been focusing on the functional reconstruction of neural tissue since 1994. He introduced the multi-disciplinary field of whole brain emulation and is lead curator of the scientific roadmap with which its technological development is promoted.
Working with the VU University Amsterdam, Dr. Koene led the creation of NETMORPH, a computational framework for the simulated morphological development of large-scale high-resolution neuroanatomically realistic neuronal circuitry.
Dr. Koene is CEO and Founder of the science foundation Carboncopies.org and neural interfaces company NeuraLink Co. He is Science Director of the 2045 Initiative and advises several neurotechnology companies and organizations.
In previous roles, Dr. Koene was Director of Analysis at Silicon Valley nanotechnology company Halcyon Molecular (2010-12) and Director of the Department of Neuroengineering at Tecnalia, the third largest private research organization in Europe (2008-10). Dr. Koene was a research professor at Boston University's Center for Memory and Brain.
He earned his Ph.D. studying memory mechanisms at McGill University, after obtaining an M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering with a specialization in Information Theory at Delft University of Technology.
Dr. Koene’s publications, presentations and interviews are available at http://randalkoene.com.