Neuroinformatics

Understanding the human nervous system is one of the greatest challenges of 21st century science. Its abilities dwarf any man-made system - perception, decision-making, cognition and reasoning. Its functioning spans many scientific disciplines - from molecular biology to anthropology.

Neuroinformatics integrates these endeavours through the application of computational methods and ideas in modelling and analysis.

In order to understand the nervous system, we need to bridge many different levels of investigation, from molecules to cells, from systems to organisms, which are addressed in diverse disciplines &mdash; genomics, proteomics, systems biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, linguistics, psychology, anthropology to name some. While the accumulation of facts and data on the brain has been rapid and impressive, the depth of our insight regarding their meaning remains much more limited. Similarly, over the last few decades we have seen tremendous advances in computer science, yet our most advanced computer system is surpassed in many real-world tasks by even so-called primitive creatures, such as the ant or the honey-bee. Both from a practical and a conceptual perspective there are many points of contact between the neuroscience-related life-sciences (e.g., neuroscience, neuroethology, psychology, linguistics, philosophy) and the information sciences and related disciplines (e.g., computer science, mathematics, statistics, physics, electrical engineering and neurorobotics).

The new transdisciplinary field of neuroinformatics develops the potential synergies between these domains. Neuroinformatics is concerned with:


 * developing and applying computational methods to the study of brain and behaviour


 * applying advanced IT methods to deal with the huge quantity and great complexity of neuroscientific data


 * exploiting our insights into the principles underlying brain function to develop new IT technologies.

Research centers include:


 * Institute of Neuroinformatics, Zurich, Switzerland
 * Computation and Neural Systems at Caltech, Pasadena, California, USA
 * Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, Frankfurt, Germany