Addressing the human brain's big data challenge with BrainX3
The human brain generates massive amounts of data resulting from its intricate and complex spatiotemporal dynamics. Biophysical mechanisms underlying these processes are key to our understanding of brain function and disease. To address this challenge, researchers at the SPECS lab lead by Prof. Paul Verschure, have recently developed BrainX3, a platform for visualization, simulation, analysis and interaction of large data, that combines computational power with human intuition in representing and interacting with large complex networks. BrainX3 serves as a hypotheses generator of big data. As is often the case with complex data, one might not always have a specific hypothesis to start with. Instead, discovering meaningful patterns and associations in big data might be a necessary incubation step for formulating well-defined hypotheses.