In a Libyan city living under the weight of war, a young man named Ahmed Al-Majbari was trying to find meaning in the events unfolding around him.
The sounds of explosions were loud, and hospitals were crowded with the injured, yet his passion for engineering did not fade. While his peers fled a harsh reality, he chose to confront it in his own way: through science.
Al-Majbari decided to harness his engineering knowledge to help those who had lost limbs in the conflict. He began with a simple experiment in a modest university laboratory, searching for a way to convert brain signals into commands to control a prosthetic hand.
He didn’t realize then that this experiment would be the first spark on his journey toward a bigger dream: building an artificial brain—a technological model that mimics the human brain’s ability to think, learn, and adapt to information.
From that moment, the idea of combining engineering and neuroscience was born, an idea that seemed more like fiction than application at the time. But Ahmed Al-Majbari saw no boundaries between dreams and science.
After graduating, he took his small project and left Libya for Germany, where he enrolled at the Technical University of Munich to study for a Master’s degree in Neuroengineering, a specialization that merged his passion for technology with his curiosity about the secrets of the human brain.
In the university’s halls, in front of a whiteboard filled with complex equations and neural diagrams, Al-Majbari began to step confidently toward his new goal: designing an artificial system capable of thought, not in the traditional sense, but in a way that emulates the human brain’s mechanism for processing information and making decisions.
“I am focusing on reverse-engineering the biological brain,” he says with a smile, “so that in the future we can replace damaged neurological functions in people with disabilities.”
Reverse engineering—a term referring to the analysis of biological systems to understand their internal structure in order to redesign them—is the core of his current project.
What Al-Majbari and his team are striving for is not just to develop a new artificial intelligence, but to redefine the very concept of intelligence. They want to build a robotic brain that can modify its internal connections according to the goal it seeks to achieve, just as a real brain does.
But the road is long, as the young researcher acknowledges. “What we are doing today is just the first step. We need a deeper understanding of how neural networks constantly change to achieve specific tasks, and how to translate these processes into a mathematical model that can be applied in a machine.”
These equations drawn on the board behind him are not just symbols, but initial attempts to translate what cannot be seen—thought—into a language that computers can understand.
Talk of a “robotic brain” today might seem like science fiction, but for Ahmed Al-Majbari, it is a promise of a future where science and technology converge to serve humanity, and perhaps, one day, to heal an impairment long considered impossible to overcome.
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