'Google of the brain' neuroimaging project receives $2.5 million NIH grant
Indiana University Bloomington cognitive scientist Michael Jones, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Colorado, University of Texas at Austin and Washington University in St. Louis, was awarded $2.5 million from the National Institute of Mental Health to develop an automated system for large-scale synthesis of human neuroimaging data.
The four-year award will support the development of NeuroSynth.org, an online platform that is intended to be sort of a “Google of the brain” for researchers in cognitive neuroscience. The unique system will be designed to learn new concepts, draw inferences and make discoveries based on the collected sources.
"There is a vast amount of so-called ‘unrealized knowledge’ across a number of scientific sources — yet-to-be discovered information that is not located in any specific article, but is rather distributed across many," Jones said. "Scientists are regularly reading distinct but related articles to make these discoveries, and NeuroSynth will attempt to simulate and scale up this knowledge discovery process, generating novel hypotheses to test with future experiments."
