Bastian and Eleonora win Bonn Brain Art Competition

The OHBM Merit Award is not the only award, Bastian has won in March: Him and Eleonora Ambrad Giovannetti, who created the oil on canvas artwork, submitted their painting to the Bonn Brain Art Competition, being held as part of the 2019 Bonn Brain Meeting, and collected the most votes. Bastian explains:

"Our artwork depicts a mathematical representation of the famous perceptron, the widely used workhorse behind artificial neural networks, invented by the American psychologist Frank Rosenblatt (1957). With the broadly celebrated (and sometimes feared) advances in the field of deep learning, the greater public starts directing existential questions about basic as well as advanced brain functions towards Computer Scientists. This results in a plethora of highly speculative and plainly wrong assumptions of the actual biological neural networks. The here alluded painting of René Magritte „The treachery of images“, depicts a pipe, which in the form of an oil painting is nothing more than a visual representation and will never materialize to an actual pipe. In parallel to this, the artifical neurons modelled in current AI-research, are mere oversimplified mathematical echoes of the complex systems, we as Neuroscientists aim to decipher."

Winning Artwork "The treachery of silicon" by Bastian David and Eleonora Ambrad Giovanetti at the Bonn Brain Art competition

Bastian wins OHBM Merit Award

The Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM), the most important professional society for neuroimaging research, has conferred one of 15 prestigious OHBM Merit Awards to Bastian David for his work „Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks Support the Detection of Focal Cortical Dysplasias“. Bastian will present his this yet unpublished study as part of an oral session at the annual meeting of the OHBM in Rome on Thursday, June 13.

Theodor won the GEROK award 2019

TNG’s leader Theodor Rüber won the GEROK award 2019 of the BONFOR research commission of the medical faculty of the University of Bonn. The BONFOR research commission provides funding for young clinical scientists. The goal perspective of BONFOR programs is to prepare young researchs to obtain third-pary funding. Theodor had successfully applied for two years of funding for his own position and has also obtained funding for a junior research group. Part of the TNG went to Cologne at night to invest the prize money in the vibrant Cologne pub scene.