The second review of Wetware-related Grand Challenge proposals discusses the Memories for Life project, proposed by Andrew Fitzgibbon with the Robotics Research Group at the University of Oxford and Ehud Reiter lecturer in Computing Science at the University of Aberdeen.

The Memories for Life project is subtitled “Managing information over a human lifetime”. It addresses people’s need for a unified system to store, manage and access the “ever-increasing amount of information about themselves, including emails, web browsing histories, digital images, and audio recordings” one amasses during the life.
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First in the series of reviews of the Wetware-related Grand Challenges I promised; a closer look at the project In Vivo In Silico, proposed by Professor Ronan Sleep at the School of Computing Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich.

“In Vivo” is a Latin term commonly used in biology and medicine to refer to something that occurs within a biological organism, as opposed to “In Vitro”, meaning literally “in glass” e.g. “an egg fertilized In Vitro”. The term “In Silico” is intended to describe the third option for biological observation or experiment. The In Vivo In Silico project aims to simulate the development, cell function, sensory, interaction and overall behavior of organisms accurately enough to allow it to be used in research, adding to and sometimes even replacing the “real thing”.
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The Human Genome project and the project to create a championship chess playing program are among the projects recognized by the UK Computing Research Committee (UKCRC) as so-called Grand Challenge projects. Inspired mainly by the Human Genome Project “the Committee has noted that the progress of a mature branch of science can occasionally be accelerated by the promotion of a Grand Challenge Project.” To achive a Grand Challenge status, a project must meet a certain criteria, including clear goals, broad participation and commitment of resources by the scientific community and a timescale of completion of around 15 years.

The committee is working to start seven new such projects after receiving research proposals for over 100 possible Grand Challenge projects. Of these seven projects, at least four are highly related to Wetware subjects. This article lists the seven projects. In follow up articles, we will take a closer look at each of those four projects and discuss their possible implications.
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