Base Technology: Conference on Brain Informatics (BI)

I frequently receive conference announcements in my in-box and rarely do they inspire me much at all, but the announcement for a conference on "Brain Informatics" certainly caught my attention. The announcement for "2010 International Conference on Brain Informatics (BI 2010)" or "Brain Informatics 2010" tells us that:

Brain Informatics (BI) has recently emerged as an interdisciplinary research field that focuses on studying the mechanisms underlying the human information processing system (HIPS). It investigates the essential functions of the brain, ranging from perception to thinking, and encompassing such areas as multi-perception, attention, memory, language, computation, heuristic search, reasoning, planning, decision-making, problem-solving, learning, discovery, and creativity. The goal of BI is to develop and demonstrate a systematic approach to achieving an integrated understanding of both macroscopic and microscopic level working principles of the brain, by means of experimental, computational, and cognitive neuroscience studies, as well as utilizing advanced Web Intelligence (WI) centric information technologies.

It goes on to say that:

BI represents a potentially revolutionary shift in the way that research is undertaken. It attempts to capture new forms of collaborative and interdisciplinary work. In this vision, new kinds of BI methods and global research communities will emerge, through infrastructure on the wisdom Web and knowledge grids that enables high speed and distributed, large-scale analysis and computations, and radically new ways of sharing data/knowledge.

And:

Brain Informatics 2010 provides a leading international forum to bring together researchers and practitioners from diverse fields, such as computer science, information technology, artificial intelligence, Web intelligence, cognitive science, neuroscience, medical science, life science, economics, data mining, data and knowledge engineering, intelligent agent technology, human computer interation, complex systems, and system science, to explore the main research problems in BI lie in the interplay between the studies of human brain and the research of informatics. On the one hand, one models and characterizes the functions of the human brain based on the notions of information processing systems. WI centric information technologies are applied to support brain science studies. For instance, the wisdom Web and knowledge grids enable high-speed, large-scale analysis, simulation, and computation as well as new ways of sharing research data and scientific discoveries. On the other hand, informatics-enabled brain studies, e.g., based on fMRI, EEG, MEG significantly broaden the spectrum of theories and models of brain sciences and offer new insights into the development of human-level intelligence on the wisdom Web and knowledge grids.

The announcement provides another summary for "Brain Informatics (BI)":

Brain Informatics (BI) is an emerging interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary research field that focuses on studying the mechanisms underlying the human information processing system (HIPS). BI investigates the essential functions of the brain, ranging from perception to thinking, and encompassing such areas as multi-perception, attention, memory, language, computation, heuristic search, reasoning, planning, decision-making, problem-solving, learning, discovery, and creativity. One goal of BI research is to develop and demonstrate a systematic approach to an integrated understanding of macroscopic and microscopic level working principles of the brain, by means of experimental, computational, and cognitive neuroscience studies, as well as utilizing advanced Web Intelligence (WI) centric information technologies. Another goal is to promote new forms of collaborative and interdisciplinary work. New kinds of BI methods and global research communities will emerge, through infrastructure on the wisdom Web and knowledge grids that enables high speed and distributed, large-scale analysis and computations, and radically new ways of data/knowledge sharing.

Conference topics include:

Thinking and perception-centric investigations of HIPS:

Human reasoning mechanisms (e.g., principles of human deductive/inductive reasoning, common-sense reasoning, decision making, and problem solving)
Human learning mechanisms (e.g., stability, personalized user/student models)
Emotion, heuristic search, information granularity, and autonomy related issues in human reasoning and problem solving
Human higher cognitive functions and their relationships
Human multi-perception mechanisms and visual, auditory, and tactile information processing
Methodologies for systematic design of cognitive experiments
Investigating spatiotemporal characteristics and flow in HIPS and the related neural structures and neurobiological process
Cognitive architectures; their relations to fMRI/EEG/MEG
HIPS meets complex systems
Modeling brain information processing mechanisms (e.g., neuro-mechanism, mathematical, cognitive and computational models of HIPS).