Blue Brain’s Samuel Kerrien presents at the Frontiers Data Services Workshop – Open Research Data to Support Sustainable Health Initiatives

Frontiers hosted its second Data Services Workshop in Brussels on April 24 with this year’s workshop focusing on the application of open research data to support sustainable health initiatives. Drawing lessons from recent successes in the use of big data and artificial intelligence in data-intensive health research, it aimed to discuss policy challenges and actions necessary in Europe to unleash the full potential of open research data in health for the benefit of society.

Earlier this year, EPFL’s Blue Brain Project announced the release of its open source software project ‘Blue Brain Nexus’ – an open source, data and knowledge management platform designed to enable open data-driven science by enabling the FAIR principles, tracking data provenance and supporting data longevity in a secure and scalable manner.

Organizing, integrating and maintaining data in a sustainable way is a significant challenge for most organizations. Blue Brain Nexus offers an innovative solution to address a wide spectrum of challenges ranging from data governance, connecting data silos, enabling knowledge discovery as well as accelerating data intensive research.

As part of the ‘cutting-edge technologies and services for data-intensive health research’ session, Samuel presented the Blue Brain Nexus to over 130 attendees from all over Europe (including policymakers, researchers, academics, patient advocates, tech & pharma companies, universities, funders and libraries). In his presentation, Samuel explained that the Blue Brain Nexus is instrumental in supporting all stages of the Blue Brain Project’s data-driven modelling cycle including, but not limited to experimental data, single cell models, circuits, simulations and validations. The brain is a complex multi-level system and is one of the biggest ‘Big Data’ problems we have today. Therefore, Blue Brain Nexus is a perfect fit to organize, store and process exceptionally large volumes of data and support usage by a broad number of users.

Samuel also explained how Blue Brain Nexus specifically enables the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) data management principles and how it fits within the EU policy context of the European Open Science Cloud and open research data policies.

Blue Brain Nexus is available under the Apache 2 license at: https://bluebrain.github.io/nexus/

For more information, please contact Samuel – [email protected]

Click here to read Frontiers post event blog and to view Samuel’s full presentation.

Samuel Kerrien presenting in Brussels ©️Simon Pugh Photography