Mason News May 22, 2013 by Michele McDonald
Renowned neuroscientist Giorgio Ascoli is working on another complexity related to the brain — how to handle the massive amount of data researchers are creating on a near-daily basis.
Neuroscientist Giorgio AscoliCreative Services photo
The George Mason University researcher is the lead investigator on a grant from the prestigious National Academies Keck Futures Initiative that is a step toward giving researchers another tool in their work. It’s a data overload worth organizing because, as Ascoli points out, such a “knowledge base” could reveal patterns, show untapped areas for future research and cut duplication.
“You identify what you do not know,” says Ascoli, who is a University Professor in the Molecular Neuroscience Department and the founding director of the Center for Neural Informatics, Structures and Plasticity at the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study. “You also create a map of what is known and what is not known.”
The knowledge base for brain data dovetails with the White House’s recent BRAIN Initiative. “The BRAIN Initiative is trying to do with the brain what the Human Genome Project did with genes,” Ascoli says.
Researchers are hard at work publishing scores of articles in hundreds of journals ...
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