Thomas Tränkler

Providing research & development IT consultancy services for client projects in the domains of computer science, artificial intelligence, computational neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience & cognitive psychology. A long term project has been the consultancy work for the Blue Brain Project, a project with the vision of simulating the human brain in a supercomputer neuron by neuron. The Blue Brain Project as a proof of concept for Prof. Markram's vision of simulation based brain research recently secured a grant of more than 1 billion Euros for the Human Brain Project (directed by Prof. Markram) being one of two EU flagship projects. The project is directed by Prof. Henry Markram, a neuroscientist who in the lab of nobel laureate Prof. Bert Sakmann discovered synaptic spike timing dependent plasticity rules governing the signaling principles between neurons. The consultancy work contributed to the pioneering work in the early phase of the project. During the bootstrapping phase of the Blue Brain Project, the application programming interface to the simulation data and some of the analysis and visualization methods like structural and voltage sensitive dye imaging simulation were designed in close collaboration with the client's researchers addressing the needs of researchers for easy to use and stable interfaces to the simulation data and to prototype and test out analysis and imaging modes and methods.