Implementing digital services to empower neuroscience research for health and brain inspired technology via EBRAINS

ExpectedOutcome:

Project results are expected to contribute to all the following outcomes:

• integrated multi-disciplinary collaborative tools and services widely serving the European neuroscientific community, providing them with FAIR data indexing and archival, multilevel data mining and modelling/simulation of brain functions, and empowering workflows for reproducible research;
• a rich collection of multilevel human brain models, atlases and workflows, directly supporting the research and development for personalised brain medical treatments e.g. target binding drugs, precise neuro-stimulation positioning and guided surgery, regarding brain diseases such as epilepsy, Parkinson, consciousness disorders, or rare or multi-factor diseases;
• a comprehensive set of cognitive brain model scaffolds and associated modular / large-size neuromorphic and neurorobotic facilities for assisting the design and validation of applicative cognitive technologies benefitting from neurosciences latest knowledge, as enablers for autonomous and adaptive robotics approaches that use fast sensory processing and decision-making capabilities;
• supplementary population of EBRAINS facilities with multidisciplinary services/applications that answer well-identified new neuroscience related S&T needs, in correlation with national and European research priorities for neuroscience, brain medicine and cognitive-technologies;
• integration of EBRAINS with EOSC and linkage with common European data spaces in the life science and health sector;
• better-aligned national investments in neuroscience across Europe, building on the Member States’ and Associated Countries’ specialised competence centres, which in turn will help creating additional synergies and enabling further research activities around the EBRAINS services.

Scope:

Building on the EBRAINS architecture and base facilities developed under Horizon 2020, the scope of this action is to:

1. To implement a user-friendly service infrastructure along the principles of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) to widely serve the research communities in neurosciences, brain medicine and brain-inspired cognitive technologies. This includes the following dimensions:

• Enabling the EBRAINS research infrastructure digital facilities supporting neuroscience dedicated tools and services, with a high quality of service including robustness, security, scalability, flexibility, usability and user-centricity. This includes a sustainable system for allocation and management of data capacities and of simulation and computing service resources.
• Establishing in-depth collaboration with teams from other European research and testing infrastructures and of EOSC, in order to ensure efficiency and harmonisation, e.g. regarding Authorisation, Authentication and Identification (AAI), Persistent Identifiers (PID), discovery ontologies and API for both services and data.
• Directly interfacing with the European HPC capacities towards exascale, deployed in EuroHPC and capitalising on the FENIX^[1] developments for big-data integration and interactive use.
• Delivering an efficient Europe-wide service to researchers, based on promoting excellence and innovation, and supporting users’ digital experiments with the assistance of high-level support teams and feedback mechanisms, and guiding communities in developing novel software solutions that build on the EBRAINS base offering.
• Deploying an open metrics framework to assess the EBRAINS performances reached, the efficiency of the facilities offered in particular regarding the human-based services, and the uptake especially regarding the enabled science excellence and related results and the medical and technological innovation empowerment.

2. To develop, integrate in EBRAINS, and operate:

• Constantly improving open science services/applications that respond to up-to-date and upcoming identified needs of the neuroscientific community, with a co-design approach and in-depth engagement with scientific, medical and industrial stakeholders and the establishment of an appropriate and transparent prioritisation mechanism. This includes ensuring openness to other research groups and new applications; reaching out to scientific and industrial communities, including with tailored training and skills development programmes.
• The deployment of complementary S&T services from regional or national competence nodes, supporting and enriching the cloud-based deliveries and facilitating the sharing of produced data and use of national resources.

In addition to the above, EBRAINS should open its approaches to other communities, going beyond neuroscience, for example by supporting compute-intensive simulation to identify candidate drugs addressing new disease targets in other explicit medical domains where this approach is justified.

The financial support to third parties mechanism (see specific call conditions) can be used to design and develop new services (under item 2) and/or to facilitate the co-design approaches and/or the targeted involvement of broader stakeholders, user communities and competence nodes.

Cross-cutting Priorities:

Artificial IntelligenceDigital AgendaEOSC and FAIR data

[1]https://fenix-ri.eu