“But we need to improve 106-fold or more,” says Denk, who estimates that this would shrink the three billion person years it would take to trace a cortical column down to about two years. “I’m confident in the end that we will be able to do it,” he says. “But I don’t know how long it will take us–if we’re lucky, maybe a year or so.”
From this article. The plan is to use an artificial neural network to speed up the data processing of the slices of the biological neural network. It should then be possible to build better simulations of the biological neural network, which in turn should help our understanding of how these work, which then leads to more powerful artificial neural network designs…