In the morning of July 8, the European Blue Brain Project and Southeast University signed a cooperation agreement in Nanjing. This is the first time that the European Blue Brain Project has signed a large-scale cooperation agreement on neuronal morphology and brain simulation with a Chinese academic institution. Mr. Sean Hill, Director of the Blue Brain Project, Ding Hui, Chief Accountant of Southeast University, principals from the Department of Biological Science and Medical Engineering of Southeast University, the Institute of Life Sciences and Jiangbei New District Innovation Research Institute of Southeast University attended the ceremony.

During the ceremony, Sean Hill and Ding Hui signed the agreement on behalf of both parties. Ding Hui highly appraised the achievements made by Southeast University-Allen Brain Science Research Center in the preceding year ever since its establishment. He indicated that the school would fully support the cooperation between the two scientific research institutions. Sean Hill said Southeast University was screened as its own partner because the Joint Research Center for Southeastern University-Allen Brain Science Research Institute could produce high-quality neuromorphic reconstruction. He believed that the cooperation between the two parties would further promote the development of the brain science and strengthen the research on the neurons, as the basic units of the brain. Both well-known academic institutions expected to establish a highly efficient and accurate neuron reconstruction pipeline through this cooperation agreement, and achieve the reconstruction of high-throughput and large-scale brain neurons through human-machine synergy, machine vision and virtual reality so as to provide a foundation for exploring the brain and brain-like intelligence.

At present, research on brain and mind has become one of the hot researches in contemporary science. “Blue Brain Project” was founded in 2005 by the Institute of Brain and Psychology at the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland to study the biological data reconstruction and the mammalian brain simulation, thus to identify the effects of brain structure and functions on physical health. The Joint Research Center for Southeast University-Allen Brain Science Institute was established in 2018 as an emerging frontier research base for brain science. It is rooted in the cutting-edge researches in the fields of life science, brain science and biomedical engineering at Southeast University in combination with the cutting-edge research advantages of Allen Brain Science Institute in the world. Up to now, it has conducted pioneering researches in the field of whole brain neuron reconstruction and modeling, and has achieved world-astonishing scientific research achievements just in one year.