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."
