As part of the public engagement endeavors of the HBP, eight citizen consultations were organized in order to learn about the European citizens’ opinions and reflections on potential dual use of HBP research, and to present their ideas and opinions to the researchers and managers of the HBP. The workshops took place in Denmark, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Slovakia, UK, Malta, and Lithuania.

The Medical Informatics Platform (MIP) being developed as a part of the Human Brain Project, is currently one of the most promising ICT platforms to share clinical brain data. In order to inform neuroscientists and clinicians in Denmark about the MIP and open a discussion on how Danish hospitals can benefit from the wealth of data, a workshop on how to join the MIP will be held in Copenhagen.

The DBT organized and promoted an online citizen survey in ten European countries. The purpose of the survey was to explore the values, concerns, and hopes of the European citizens regarding HBP research and neuroscience in general, given the circumstance that it could be used by others for political, security, intelligence, or military purposes.

Self-tracking devises are potential key players in the development of personalized and participatory health care and may help to provide health care information beneficial for research and clinical decision making. During an online debate stakeholders and experts discussed the potential of using data tracked by patients and research participants themselves in clinical brain neuroscience

Informed consent is a formal agreement that a patient sign to give permission for a medical procedure (such as surgery). In an online debate guest speakers explained the complexity, solutions and trends in relation to informed consent and provided their recommendations for best practise.

During a half day workshop HBP Ethic Rapporteurs, Ethic and Society (SP12) and the HBP Ethic Advisory Board met to reflect on issues related to potential military and defense applications of HBP research (dual use). The goal was to provide concrete concerns and recommendations to the HBP Opinion on dual use.

As any other EU project, HBP is regulated to prevent research and technological development to be used for military or defense purposes (‘dual use’). Nevertheless there might be dual use interests in the project. In a two day seminar, HBP researchers and external experts met to initiate a dialogue on recognition and management of dual use issues in the HBP.

Six citizen meetings were organized in order to provide the public with an opportunity to reflect on issues related to privacy and data protection in research projects, and to provide their ideas and opinions to the researchers and managers of the HBP. The meetings took place in Austria, Bulgaria, Poland, Portugal, the Netherlands and Sweden.

In an online debate on future computing and robotics external experts and HBP researchers were invited to explore the ethical, social and technical issues related to future advances in ICT, neuromorphic computing and robotics.

Researchers from the Human Brain Project (HBP) met with scientists from the neuroscience community to initiate an on-going dialogue on the data and theory for advancing the future neuroscience and the HBP.