BRAIN, COMPUTATION, AND DATA SCIENCE

Computational approaches to understanding brain function form an important and growing area of interdisciplinary research. Gaining a detailed understanding of the human brain has been universally accepted as one of the important grand challenges of the 21st century. The grandness of the challenge and the requirement of diverse forms of expertise necessitate synergistic interactions among neurobiologists, computer scientists and electrical engineers. Many faculty members interested in different aspects of this problem have recently come together and formed an informal research group (also called a thematic cluster) on Brain, Computation, and Data Science. This group comprises more than twenty faculty members from eight different departments (namely, CDS, CNS, CSA, ECE, EE, ESE, MATHS, and MBU) pointing to the interdisciplinary nature of this research endeavour. The group includes researchers in experimental and theoretical neurobiology, artificial intelligence, machine learning, signal processing, electronic systems, hybrid (electronic and neural) hardware systems, etc.
The current work of this group spans the areas of Neuromorphic hardware and hybrid systems, computational models for representation and processing of sensory (e.g., vision, speech, language) information in brain, computational models of biological neurons, neural plasticity, models of learning, signal processing, machine learning, big data analytics, large scale computational models, etc. The vision of this group is to become the nucleus of "Indian Brain Project" and contribute to significant breakthroughs in our understanding of the brain.