Timo Dickscheid

Panel Member

Jülich Contributions to HBP

The Forschungszentrum Jülich and its institutes contribute substantially to several areas of research within the Human Brain Project. The Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1), for example, provides fundamental neurobiological information about the structure and function of the human brain and is responsible for developing the HBP Human Brain Atlas as part of the publicly accessible infrastructure. INM-1 director Katrin Amunts leads Subproject 2 (Human Brain Organization) and the Science and Infrastructure Board (SIB), and INM-1 group leader Timo Dickscheid is the co-lead of HBP’s neuroinformatics platform. INM-6 develops multi-scale models of the brain, develops and maintains the NEST simulation code for large spiking neuronal networks, and advances digital workflows for the analysis of electrophysiological data. The INM-7 creates workflows for the analysis of structural and functional MRI images of the living human brain that can be used as input into machine-learning models for the prediction of individual phenotypes in health and disease. The mission of the HPAC Platform, which is led by Thomas Lippert, Jülich Supercomputing Centre, is to build, integrate and operate the federated supercomputing and data infrastructure for the Human Brain Project enabling scientists to run large-scale, data-intensive, interactive simulations, to manage large amounts of data and to implement and manage complex workflows. The Simulation Laboratory Neuroscience has a bridging function, connecting neuroscience applications with the methods and resources of high performance computing.

In future, virtual models of the brain will make it easier to understand the structure and function of the healthy and diseased brain, and enable new drugs to be developed and tested. The human brain will also be used as a model for neuro-inspired/neuromorphic computing technologies.

These and other research activities, which are carried out within the framework of Jülich’s Supercomputing and Modeling for the Human Brain (SMHB), comprise the focus of this session.

Speakers: Thomas Lippert, Abigail Morrison, Anna Lührs, Timo Dickscheid, Simon Eickhoff, Forschungszentrum Jülich

Short CV

Timo Dickscheid is heading the "Big Data Analytics" group at the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1), Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany. He graduated in Computer Science at the University of Koblenz in 2006, and earned his PhD at the University of Bonn in 2011, where he worked on the 3D reconstruction of buildings from images under the supervision of Prof. Wolfgang Förstner. In 2010, he joined INM-1 as a post-doc to build high-resolution 3D models of the human brain from microscopic images. After accepting a position as the head of Information Technology at the German Federal Institute of Hydrology in Koblenz in 2012, Dickscheid returned back to Jülich in 2014 to build his own research group. His work now focuses on scalable image processing and machine learning methods for building a multilevel atlas of the human brain, as well as infrastructure development for handling large microscopic image data. In the Human Brain Project (HBP), Dickscheid is co-leading the neuroinformatics platform, and responsible for the development of a publicly accessible multi-level human brain atlas.