On April 2, 2013, President Obama launched the Brain Research though Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative as a bold new research effort to revolutionize our understanding of the human mind and uncover new ways to treat, prevent, and cure brain disorders.  The initiative is a joint program with funding through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the National Science Foundation (NSF).

New partnerships between computer scientists and neuroscientists could help create breakthrough technologies as a part of the BRAIN Initiative. In conjunction with the NSF, the CCC held a workshop to bring together these two communities to further explore the Interfaces between Brain Science and Computer Science.

Computer science and brain science share deep intellectual roots – after all, computer science sprang out Alan Turing’s musings about the brain in the spring of 1936.  Today, understanding the structure and function of the human brain is one of the greatest scientific challenges of our generation. Decades of study and continued progress in our knowledge of neural function and brain architecture have led to important advances in brain science, but a comprehensive understanding of the brain still lies well beyond the horizon.

This two-day workshop, sponsored by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) and National Science Foundation (NSF), brought together brain researchers and computer scientists for a scientific dialogue aimed at exposing new opportunities for joint research in the many exciting facets, established and new, of the interface between the two fields.

Click here for the workshop program PDF.