blue brain : a subway to artificial intelligence

1. UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING
RAJASTHAN TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY, KOTA
A SEMINAR PRESENTATION
ON
“blue brain : a subway to artificial intelligence”
PRESENTED BY :
SNEHA AGARWAL
FINAL YR. B.TECH(EC)

2. OVERVIEW :
1. Introduction
2. History
3. What is blue brain
4. Artificial intelligence
5. What is virtual brain
6. Function of natural brain
7. Steps involved
8. Hardware and software requirements
9. Positive aspects
10. Negative aspects
11. Conclusion

3. INTRODUCTION :
Human brain , the most valuable creation of God.
The man is called intelligent because of the brain.
But we loss the knowledge of the brain when the
body is destroyed after the death.
“blue brain” – the name of worlds first virtual brain.
That means a machine that can function as a
human brain.
Is it really possible to create human brain?

4. “YES”, the IBM is now developing virtual brain
known as the BLUE brain. It would be the world’s
first virtual brain.
within 30 years, we will be able to scan ourselves in
to the computer.

5. HISTORY :
Blue gene/P 147.456 and 144 TB memory cat-scale with
1 billion neuron ,10 trillion synapses 100-1000 times
slower than real time at 0.1ms simulation resolution.
Prediction : in 2019 , using a supercomputer with 1 extra
flops/s and 4PB of main memory ,a near real time
human scale simulation may become possible.

6. Blue Brain is the name of the world’s
first virtual brain. A Virtual machine is
one that can function as , a very
appropriate application of an Artificial
Intelligence human brain . Reverse
engineering is a foremost concept of
implementing the human brain and
recreate it at the cellular level inside a
complete simulation
WHAT IS BLUE BRAIN ?

7. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE :
Artificial intelligence , a technology which builds
intelligent machines , and imparts intelligent agents.
Blue brain project is assumed to be first one to explore
about a true “Artificial Intelligence” via the process of
reverse engineering and also an effort to reverse
engineering a human brain.
AI is the exhibited by machine or software.

9. WHAT IS VIRTUAL BRAIN ?
A machine that can function as brain.
It can take decision.
It can think.
It can response.
It can keep things in memory.
It also has feelings and emotions.

10. WHY WE NEED VIRTUAL BRAIN ?
Treatment of brain dis-functioning.
Scientific curiosity about human
mind and consciousness.
 A bottom up approach towards
building thinking machine.
 Databases of all neuro-scientific
research results and related past
stories.

11. FUNCTIONING OF HUMAN BRAIN:
Sensory input:
Receiving input such as sound , images, etc. through
sensory cell.
Interpretation :
Interpretation of received input by brain by defining
states of neuron in the brain.
Motor output:
Receiving of electrical impulses from brain to perform
any action.

12. 1.Data acquisition:
It involves collecting brain portions,
taking them under a microscope, and
gauging the shape and electrical
behavior of neurons individually.
2. Simulation
It concerns with two major aspects:
a. Simulation speed
b. Simulation workflow
3. Visualization
The blue gene has been translated in
to a 3D visual representation of the
column to design a visualization
interface
STEPS INVOLVED :

13. DATA ACQUISITION :
take 300 µm-thick brain slices from the somatosensory
cortex of juvenile WISTAR RAT(aged 14 to 16 days).
 tissue is stained with biocytin and viewed through a
bright field microscope . Neuronal 3D morphologies are
then reconstructed using the Neurolucida software
package (pictured below, far right) which runs on
Windows workstations.
 electrophysiological behavior of neurons is studied
using a 12 patch clamp instrument.
 It enables twelve living neurons to
be concurrently patched and their
electrical activity recorded.

14. BRAIN SIMULATION :
• NEURON
•It is written in C, C++,
and FORTRAN
• in 2005 the package
was ported to the
massively parallel Blue
Gene supercomputer.

15. SIMULATION SPEED :
In 2012 simulations of one cortical column (~10,000
neurons) run at approximately 300 x slower than real
time
linear scaling - that is, doubling the size of the neural
network doubles the time it takes to simulate.
simulation timestep for the numerical integrations is
0.025 ms and the timestep for writing the output to disk
is 0.1 ms .

16. SIMULATION OVERFLOW :
This step involves synthesizing virtual cells using
the algorithms
a network skeleton is built from all the different
kinds of synthesized neurons.
cells are connected together according to the
rules that have been found experimentally.
Finally the neurons are functionalized and the
simulation brought to life.

17. The team will start by modeling the electrical
structure of neural circuits repeated throughout
the brain and then map and model their
behavior.
Once complete, they will move onto creating a
molecular model of the neurons involved and a
complete neocortex (the largest and most
complex part of human brain) before modeling
the rest of the brain.

18. SIMULATING THE MICRO CIRCUIT :
Once the microcircuit is built, the exciting work of making
the circuit function can begin. All the 8192 processors of
the Blue Gene are pressed into service, in a massively
parallel computation solving the complex mathematical
equations that govern the electrical activity in each
neuron when a stimulus is applied. As the electrical
impulse travels from neuron to neuron, the results are
communicated via inter-processor communication (MPI).

19. Currently, the time required to simulate the circuit is
about two orders of magnitude larger than the
actual biological time simulated. The Blue Brain
team is working to streamline the computation so
that the circuit can function in real time - meaning
that 1 second of activity can be modeled in one
second.

20. Natural brain vs simulated brain
INPUT INPUT
1.Through the natural 1.Through the silicon
chips
neurons . or artificial neuron
INTERPRETATION INTERPRETATION
2.By different states of 2.By a set of bits in the
set
Neuron in the brain. of register .

21. OUTPUT OUTPUT
3.Through the natural 3. Through the silicon
Neurons. chips .
PROCESSING PROCESSING
4.Through arithmetic and 4. Through arithmetic
logical calculations and logical calculations
and artificial intelligence
MEMORY MEMORY
5.Through permanent states 5. Through
secondary
Of neuron memory.

22. VISUALIZATION OF RESULT :
A visual exploration of the circuit is an important part
of the analysis
The Blue Gene has been translated into a 3D visual
representation of the column to design a visualization
interface.
RT Neuron is the primary application used by the
BBP for visualization of neural simulations. It is written
in C++ and OpenGL.
 RT Neuron is ad-hoc software written specifically for
neural simulations.
RT Neuron takes the output from simulations in
NEURON and renders them in 3D.

24. “Now there is no question how the virtual brain
will work. But the question is how the human
brain will be uploaded in to it. This is possible
due to the first growing technology. “

25. UPLOADING THE HUMAN BRAIN:
The uploading is possible by the use of small
robots known as the nanobots.
 These robots are small enough to travel
through out our circulatory system.
Traveling into the spine and brain, they will
be able to monitor the activity and structure of
our central nervous system.
 They will be able to provide an interface with
computer while we still reside in our biological
form.

26. Nanobots could also carefully scan the
structure of our brain, providing a complete
readout of the connection.
This information, when entered into a
computer, could then continue to function as us.
Thus the data stored in the entire brain will be
uploaded into the computer.

27. HARDWARE AND SOFTWAERE
REQUIREMENTS :
 8,096 CPUs at 700 MHZ(downgraded to handle
massive parallel processing).
 256 MB to 512 MB memory per processor
 Linux and C++ software
 100 kilowatts power consumption.
 very powerful nanobots to act as natural interface
between the natural brain and the computer.
 Wide interconnecting network.
 A program to map electric impulses from human
brain to input signal that can be received by computer.

28. The primary machine used by the Blue Brain
Project is a Blue Gene supercomputer built by
IBM.
Blue Gene/P technical specifications:
•4,096 quad-core nodes (16,384 cores in total)
•Each core is a PowerPC 450, 850 MHz
•Total: 56 teraflops, 16 terabytes of memory
•4 racks, one row, wired as a 16x16x16 3D torus
•1 PB of disk space, GPFS parallel file system
•Operating system: Linux SuSE SLES 10

30. POSITIVE ASPECTS :
We can remember things without any effort.
Decision can be made without the presence of a
person.
Even after the death of a man his intelligence can be
used.
The activity of different animals can be understood.
That means by interpretation of the electric impulses
from the brain of the animals, their thinking can be
understood easily.
It would allow the deaf to hear via direct nerve
stimulation, and also be helpful for many psychological
diseases. By down loading the contents of the brain that
was uploaded into the computer, the man can get rid
from the madness.


31. NEGATIVE ASPESCTS :
People can explore new technology that can prove
to critical threat.
We become dependent upon the computer
systems.
Technical knowledge can be hacked by others and
that can be used against us.
Computer viruses will pose an increasingly critical
threat.
The real threat, however, is the fear that people will
have of new technologies. That fear may culminate
in a large resistance. Clear evidence of this type of
fear is found today with respect to human cloning.

32. CONCLUSION:
In conclusion, we will be able to transfer
ourselves into computers at some point. Most
arguments against this outcome are seemingly
easy to circumvent. They are either simple
minded, or simply require further time for
technology to increase. The only serious threats
raised are also overcome as we note the
combination of biological and digital technologies.