BION: a step towards the synthetic brain

Why BION: in the last few decades, the age old dream of building an artificial brain, i.e. using biological cognitive systems as a benchmark and inspiration to fabricate complex material assemblies which can learn, make decisions, analyze information in a highly parallel way, has acquired the concreteness of real life research.

The success of such a program would have profound implications for information and advanced materials technologies, organic nanotechnologies and neurosciences.

 What is BION: BION brings together physicists, chemists, neurobiologists and theoretical neuroscientists in the highly interdisciplinary endeavor to fabricate and test a complex polymeric, self-assembled, “smart” matrix which can handle information similarly to specific components of biological cognitive systems. The expected result is an advanced functional microstructured organic material which can be trained and can analyze and process information in a highly parallel way.

This would open the way to a totally new, bottom-up approach to micro- and nanoelectronics, and yield an important test instrument in cognitive neurosciences.

Bion has now entered its third year. For a review of results and highlights see Second year summary  (or first year summary)   .

BION is financed by the European Community under the ICT action FET-OPEN within FP7, contract number 213219.