BSC researcher Cesare Cugnasco wins 2nd place in 2016 HBP Science Writing Competition

14 October 2016

BSC Computer Sciences researcher Cesare Cugnasco has been awarded 2nd place in the 2016 Human Brain Project (HBP) Science Writing Competition for his article “A Cubistic Beast”. The competition recognises the best articles from HBP PhD students and postdoctoral researchers aimed at a non-scientific audience.

Cugnasco explains that “the HBP Science Writing Competition has been a great opportunity to describe our work in an informal style, therefore reaching and being accessible to the multidisciplinary community of researchers that form the Human Brain Project. Also, this evening (at 7.20pm) I will give a short talk to the entire consortium so that I will be able to share more information about our work and answer questions from the public”.

This is the second time that the competition has taken place and the winners were officially announced at the HBP OpenDay Science Market, held as part of the annual HBP Summit (12-15 October 2016, Florence, Italy).

HBP held this public event for the first time in order to present scientific results and to engage with the public. The event gathered more than two hundred high school students, a large number of early career scientists, members of the Municipality of Florence, and HBP Consortium members as well as the local general public, ending up in an audience of more than 800 participants.

During the HBP Summit 2016, the BSC experts, represented by Raül Sirvent, will also participate in the documentary showcase as co-winners of the first edition of the HBP Video Selfie Campaign. The BSC documentary shows how neuroscientists need High Performance Computing tools. It will be screened during the event tomorrow and broadcast through the HBP public website and social media channels.

About Human Brain Project

The Human Brain Project is a European Commission Future and Emerging Technologies Flagship. It aims to put in place a cutting-edge, ICT-based scientific research infrastructure that will allow scientific and industrial researchers to advance our knowledge in the fields of neuroscience, computing and brain-related medicine. The project promotes collaboration across the globe and is committed to driving European industry forward.

The HBP is organised into twelve subprojects, spanning the development of six new informatics-based platforms, plus brain organisation, cognitive neuroscience, theory, ethics and society and management.

BSC is involved in Subproject 7: High Performance Analytics and Computing Platform (SP7). The overall goal of SP7 is to provide the HBP Consortium and the broader European neuroscience community with supercomputing, big data and cloud capabilities at the exascale, as well as the system software, middleware, interactive computational steering and visualisation support necessary to create and simulate multi-scale brain models and to address the hard-scaling challenges of whole brain modelling.

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