'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."

Read more

Computer Scientists Present Smile Database

What exactly happens to your face when you smile spontaneously, and how does that affect how old you look? Computer scientists from the University of Amsterdam’s (UvA) Faculty of Science recorded the smiles of hundreds of visitors to the NEMO science centre in Amsterdam, thus creating the most comprehensive smile database ever. The results can be seen via the link below. The research was conducted as part of the project Science Live, sponsored by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NOW) and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).

Smile Database: http://www.uva-nemo.org/