ANJA KASPERSEN: Today's podcast will focus on artificial intelligence (AI), neuroscience, and neurotechnologies. My guest today is Ricardo Chavarriaga. Ricardo is an electrical engineer and a doctor of computational neuroscience. He is currently the head of the Swiss office of the Confederation of Laboratories for AI Research in Europe (CLAIRE) and a senior researcher at Zurich University of Applied Sciences. Ricardo, it is an honor and a delight to share the virtual stage with you today. I am really happy and looking forward to a nice discussion today. ANJA KASPERSEN: Neuroscience is a vast and fast-developing field. Maybe you could start by providing our listeners with some background. When we think about the brain, this is something that has fascinated humanity for a long time. The question of how this organ that we have inside our heads can rule our behavior and can store and develop knowledge has been indeed one of the questions for science for many, many years. Neurotechnologies, computational neuroscience, and brain-machine interfaces are tools that we have developed to approach the understanding of this fabulous organ. When we talk about computational neuroscience it is the use of computational tools to create models of the brain. It can be mathematical models, it can be algorithms that try to reproduce our observations about the brain. It can be experiments on humans and on animals: these experiments can be behavioral, they can involve measurements of brain activity, and by looking at how the brains of organisms react and how the activity changes we will then try to apply our knowledge to create models for that. These models can have different flavors. We can for instance have very detailed models of electrochemical processes inside a neuron, and then we are looking at just a small part of the brain. We can have large-scale models with fewer details of how different brain structures interact among themselves, or even less-detailed models that try to reproduce behavior that we observe in animals and in humans as a result of certain mental disorders. We can even test these models using probes to tap into how can our brain construct representations of the world based on images, based on tactile, and based on auditory information.

CLAIRE, the Confederation of Laboratories for AI Research in Europe, launched its COVID-19 initiative in March 2020 as the first wave of the pandemic hit the continent. Its objective is to coordinate volunteer efforts of its members to contribute to tackling the effects of the disease. The taskforce was able to quickly gather a group of about 150 researchers, scientists and experts in AI organized in seven topic groups: epidemiological data analysis, mobility data analysis, bioinformatics, medical imaging, social dynamics monitoring, robotics, and scheduling and resource management. Activities of these groups yielded multiple outcomes including a publicly released resource on COVID-19 related data for drug-repurposing; the development the COVID-19 Infodemic Observatory to track spread of misinformation in social media and tools for the diagnosis based on CT scans using High Performance Computing (HPC) platforms. The latter was the catalyst for establishing a partnership between CLAIRE, the Italian National Inter-University Consortium for Informatics (CINI) and the Associazione Big Data (ABD) to provide HPC-enabled AI technologies to our network members.