Stephen Larson
OpenWorm Foundation
Builder The claim is about what the hardware does, and the philosophy is left open
Stephen Larson is a co-founder of the OpenWorm project and a coauthor of its 2014 founding paper in Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, which reported the project’s modular simulation platform for Caenorhabditis elegans. The project integrates the 302-neuron connectome encoded in NeuroML, biophysical neuronal simulation, and the Sibernetic soft-body physics engine, all developed in the open with public code, public roadmaps and open mailing lists.
The project’s design answers a sociological problem the paper states directly. Integrative modeling fails when data and code sit in institutional silos, so OpenWorm runs as a distributed open science collaboration, with a simulation platform, Geppetto, built to carry models across scales and laboratories.
This site’s Builder category refers to his role building that platform. OpenWorm is the first sustained attempt to test whether a complete connectome plus biophysics and body physics reproduces an animal’s behavior, which makes it the smallest-scale empirical test of the structural claims behind whole brain emulation. The project makes no claim about consciousness. This site covers the result in the OpenWorm post, including the validation framework the project defined.
Known for. Co-founder of the OpenWorm project, open science whole animal simulation
Coverage on this site
Related researchers
- Balázs SzigetiOpenWorm project, University of EdinburghFirst author of the 2014 OpenWorm paper, whole animal simulation
- Matt AngleParadromicsFounder and CEO of Paradromics, developer of the Connexus Direct Data Interface high-data-rate brain-computer interface
- Isabella R. BeckettCoauthor of the MaleCNS preprint comparing male and female Drosophila brain connectomes
- Stuart BergFirst author of the MaleCNS preprint on the male Drosophila central nervous system
- Edward BoydenMassachusetts Institute of Technology, Howard Hughes Medical InstituteExpansion microscopy, optogenetics, connectomics tools for consciousness research
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Sydney BrennerMRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, CambridgeFounding the C. elegans research program, the 1986 connectome, the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
Stephen Larson is listed with the other builders, who hold that the claim is about what the hardware does, and the philosophy is left open. The positions themselves are set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.