Computational Infrastructure for Brain Research: EAGER: A Computationally Enabled Knowledge Infrastructure for Cognitive Neuroscience

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The Cognitive Atlas is a major online resource for testing hypotheses about the association of neural function to anatomical structures in the human brain. The goal of this project is to greatly enhance the capabilities and performance of the Atlas using state-of-the-art information technologies and national high performance computing (HPC) resources. The result will be a powerful computational tool to assist neuroscience researchers in understanding cognitive and psychological processes and making discoveries about how the brain works, in alignment with the NSF mission to promote the progress of science and to advance the national health, prosperity and welfare.The first aim of the project is to restructure the current Cognitive Atlas database so that it will be able to interface more directly with other computing systems, and so that it can be changed in a more flexible way based on new research. The second aim is to utilize a powerful knowledge query system called Deep Dive to extract new knowledge from neuroscience publications and integrate this knowledge into the Cognitive Atlas. To address the intensive computational demands of Deep Dive, an implementation will be piloted on Wrangler, a high performance data analytics computing system hosted at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. The proposed project will enhance the computing infrastructure for neuroscience in multiple ways. By updating the system to a state-of-the-art graph database infrastructure, this work will allow much greater use of the system for automated analyses. In addition to enabling analysis of the cognitive neuroscience literature at scale for the current project, the implementation of Deep Dive on Wrangler will allow researchers in many other fields to also take advantage of this state-of-the-art application, which could have important benefits across many different areas of science and technology. This Early-concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER) award by the CISE Division of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure is jointly supported by the SBE Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences and the CISE Division of Information and Intelligent Systems, with funds associated with the NSF Understanding the Brain, BRAIN Initiative activities, and for developing national research infrastructure for neuroscience. This project also aligns with NSF objectives under the National Strategic Computing Initiative.