News

Half a million euros in funding for excellent research on brain data

The University of Salzburg is to receive 565,000 euros in funding from Land Salzburg for a new digitalisation project on brain data. The interdisciplinary project “Digital Neuroscience Initiative” aims to solve legal and technical problems for the open use of research data (Open Data). The new research project is the second brain data digitalisation project at the University of Salzburg to receive substantial public funding within a very short time. This funding will boost the research excellence of the Cognitive Neurosciences focus area at the University of Salzburg once again.

What happens in the brain when reading? What about for those with reading difficulties? How does human hearing work and what causes tinnitus? How do we learn while we sleep? These are some of the research topics of cognitive neuroscientists. They use highly specialised equipment, mainly imaging techniques, to investigate the neuronal foundations of thinking, perceiving, remembering and speaking, as well as emotions.

To ensure that this tremendous wealth of brain data generated from this research can be shared within the scientific community – and thus provide better insights for the benefit of others – legal and technical issues that stand in the way of “Open Data” need to be resolved. This is the very aim of the new interdisciplinary project “Digital Neuroscience Initiative” at the University of Salzburg, which is being supported by funding from Land Salzburg to the tune of 565,000 euros.

Over the next three years, researchers from the fields of cognitive neuroscience and computer and legal sciences at the University of Salzburg will work on the digitalisation of human brain data as part of the project and seek answers to questions surrounding the anonymisation of brain data and its long-term use in scientific databases.

Project leader Florian Hutzler from the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Salzburg is looking forward to the interdisciplinary cooperation: “Together with the database expert Nikolaus Augsten and the constitutional law expert Sebastian Schmid, we can now tackle the challenges that have been causing us headaches for some time. On the one hand, there is data protection law or the requirements of the Research Organisation Act and, on the other hand, the so-called semantic interoperability, i.e. how we ensure that other researchers know under what circumstances the data were recorded and what they mean. For that, we need so-called meta-data. This meta-data presents a big challenge. We also need to figure out how to guarantee the technical provision of the immense volume of data.”

Land Salzburg’s funding, a total of 565,000 euros, will be used to employ young scientists and to set up a “High Performance Computing Cluster” (HPC). This large-scale computing facility will provide a great deal of computing power and storage capacity to be able to analyse the extensive neurocognitive data.  The “High Performance Cluster”, named AXON – short for “Austrian X-Site Open Node”, will be utilised throughout Austria.

The infrastructures for large-scale neurocognitive research in Salzburg are already excellent, a clear indication of the excellence of the University’s focus area. Salzburg is the only location in Austria with a magnetoencephalography (MEG) laboratory. MEG is an extremely sensitive diagnostic procedure for measuring brain activity.

The “Digital Neuroscience Initiative” will reinforce the excellence of the University of Salzburg in neurocognitive research.

This initiative is the second research project at the University of Salzburg to focus on the digitalisation of brain data, following the “Austrian NeuroCloud” project, which was awarded funding in 2020. The “Austrian NeuroCloud” is being supported by the Austrian government with 1.2 million euros as part of the digitalisation offensive. Its goal is to create a nationwide computer platform through which brain data can be organised, stored and processed across all sites in compliance with common standards. This should create synergies and enable innovation transfer.

Unlike the “Austrian NeuroCloud”, the “Digital Neuroscience Initiative”, funded by Land Salzburg, is interdisciplinary in its approach. Governor Wilfried Haslauer intends to ensure that Salzburg’s research landscape is fit for the future: “The funding strategy between the state and the federal government has a clear plan. The federal government recently picked up on Salzburg’s focus area and approved the digitalisation project “Austrian NeuroCloud” – at a regional level, we are now bringing law and computer sciences on board”. Strategically, thoughts are already turning to the future – the goal, of course, is securing the best possible position in the current Excellence Initiative.

Rector Hendrik Lehnert has nominated Cognitive Neuroscience for one of the coveted Clusters of Excellence in the life sciences. The Clusters of Excellence are a programme within the Excellence Initiative, the Austrian Science Fund’s (FWF) funding scheme providing hundreds of millions of euros for excellent research.

State Councillor Andrea Klambauer feels very positive about this approach: “It was clear to us from the very beginning that digitalisation is a multidisciplinary issue – which is why the cooperation between cognitive neuroscience, computer science and law is the right way to go”.

Contact:  ccns.sbg.ac.at/people/hutzler 

MRT, Natur- und Lebenswissenschaftliche Fakultät

Univ.-Prof. Dr. Florian Hutzler

Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience Salzburg (CCNS)

Paris Lodron University of Salzburg | Department of Psychology

Hellbrunnerstraße 34 I A-5020 Salzburg  

Tel: +43 662 8044 5114

Email to Univ.-Prof. Dr. Florian Hutzler

Photo: Luigi Caputo