Accomplishments
Last Updated on Monday, 13 February 2012 10:53 Written by Brendan Allison Wednesday, 21 April 2010 17:08
This "Accomplishment" section presents a summary of what we accomplished in the Future BNCI project as of its completion in Dec 2011.
Overview
The project started in January 2010. One of our first tasks was the development of this website, scheduled to go live on 30 April. We accomplished this task on time, and our website has a variety of content. Since the inception of the project, we have also been generating publicity for our project and related BCI projects. Our consortium has introduced Future BNCI to various groups. Our first major public announcement after the project began was at an international BCI workshop held in Graz in Feb 2010 as part of the TOBI project. We made announcements at later conferences, such as the Fourth International BCI Meeting in Asilomar, Neural Interfaces Workshop in Long Beach, and TOBI workshops in Rome and Graz. We have been working on original research articles and other informational material about BCIs. This resulted in various publications, which can be found under the "references" section of this website or the roadmap.
Roadmap and interviews
We produced a roadmap addressing future issues in BNCIs. See the "Roadmap" tab of this website, or click here to see some of the interviews.
Book
We produced a book with Springer publishing. All chapters were submitted to the publisher, and the book should be published in early 2012.
Peer-reviewed papers
Click here for an article in the journal "Neuroethics" that we published in 2011. This article contains results of a survey that FBNCI conducted at the 2010 International BCI Conference in Asilomar, California. Because this article was published in an open access journal, you are welcome to share it freely. We produced several other journal and conference papers, which are noted in the roadmap.
Click here for a link to a Prezi presentation summarizing our survey results regarding the marketability of BCIs. Click here for a conference paper on this topic.
The Distinguished BCI Social Series
We organized and hosted an official Social Event at the 2010 BCI Meeting in Asilomar. Specifically, it was from 8-10 PM on Sunday, May 30, in the Main Barbecue area and Seascape Room. This was an informal event to mix with other researchers and discuss topics of interest. We are very grateful to two sponsors, g.tec and Tobii, who provided funds to help with costs for a bar monitor, bonfire, and some free food, beer, and wine for attendees. This was the inaugural event of the Distinguished BCI Social Series, a series of events launched by FBNCI to encourage interation within our cluster. These event provide a relaxing, informal environment where key stakeholders in BCI research can interact with each other. The event was sponsored by g.tec and Tobii.
Please click here for a file with more information about this event.
The Future BNCI project helped organize a Social Event as part of the Society for Neuroscience conference in San Diego in November 2010. This was the second event of the Distinguished BCI Social Series. Dr. Leigh Hochberg, a member of our Advisory Board and BCI research scientist, has organized these annual get-togethers at the last four annual SfN conferences, and we are grateful for the opportunity to work with him. This was the largest of our three Distinguished BCI Social Series events, in terms of attendance and donations. The event was sponsored by g.tec, Cortech Solutions, and the Brown University Institute for Brain Science.
The Future BNCI project organized the third event in our Distinguished Social Series in December 2010 as part of the Second TOBI workshop in Rome. We are grateful to Fabio Aloise from the Santa Lucia Foundation for helping to organize the details. Numerous key stakeholders met the evening before the conference, and since the event was hosted at the hotel where most attendees stayed, the event was especially easy to attend. The event was sponsored by g.tec. We are grateful to g.tec, and all of the sponsors, for their kind donations.
Conference and workshops
Our project hosted a conference during the week of 13 Sep 2010. This conference brought together many of the top names in BCI research for focused discussions on particular topics. More information is available on the "Conferences" subtab of this website. We also hosted six workshops in 2011, typically along with a larger conference or event. More information is available on the "Workshops" subtab of this website.
Networking Session at ICT Event
We hosted a networking session on 29 September 2010, which was part of the ICT Exposition in Brussels from 27-29 September.
Networking Session 3178 was titled:
Brain/Neuronal Computer Interaction (BNCI) Research in the 7.2 Cluster
The schedule is available here.
The slides from the first talk are available here.
The event featured brief talks, follows by structured discussion. The structured discussion featured three topics:
Emerging directions
Opportunities and roadblocks
Possibilities for collaboration
Readers are encouraged to comment via email or the Future BNCI Discussion Forum.
Stand 2973 at ICT Event
We hosted a stand at the ICT Exposition in Brussels from 27-29 September. This was actually a collection of stands, much larger than a typical stand (ours was 21 square meters, and most are 6 six square meters). The stand featured slideshows, videos, posters, and/or flyers from Future BNCI and several related projects, including Brain, BrainAble, Mundus, Tobi, BrainGain, Better, Tremor. Mindwalker, Asterics, and Decoder. We also had staff and live demonstrations from BrainGain, BrainAble, and Future BNCI. Visitors to our booth could don a cutting edge gel-free electrode system and spell, play World of Warcraft, or perform other tasks with brain activity alone! We also disseminated a lot of information to a lot of people, and made many contacts.
Our stand in Brussels.
Visitors at our stand in Brussels.
More visitors at our stand in Brussels. They are mostly wearing red caps because this is a group of students that visited our booth. The man with classes who is facing toward the camera is Alejandro Riera from Starlab, who is preparing one of the students for a demonstration with a Starlab BCI system.
A visitor to our stand in Brussels. Notice that you can hardly see her next generation gel-free electrode system, which she used to play World of Warcraft. These newer electrode systems are much more practical than conventional gel-based systems.
A different BCI user, planning to use a different demo at our stand. This is a demo of the Intendix system developed by g.tec. Notice that she spelled the name of her company (Space Applications) at 100% accuracy. She was chosen at random and never used a BCI before. This system was ready to go with a few minutes of preparation and configuation.
Here is the subject from the last picture, takling to an unknown journalist who visited her booth. On the right, Mr. Felip Miralles, the coordinator of BrainAble, holds some chocolates we brought from Austria. Many visitors to our booth got a delicious Mozartkügel!
In addition to our stand, there were many other groups represented in the BNCI Village within the Smart Systems section, or elsewhere in the Expo. The Tobi project had a very large stand near us that also had some great demos and got a lot of attention. Other projects and organizations such as Presenccia, Facets, Mindwalker, Starlab, and g.tec were also very active.
Dissemination
Most of the Accomplishments presented above constitute dissemination - that is, we are telling people about BCIs, our project, and other related projects. We participate in other dissemination efforts as well.
The "our materials" section of this page includes the Future BNCI slideshow. We gave this presentation at many professional events, including the ABCI workshop in Amsterdam in Sep 2009 (before the project began) the kickoff meetings of two other projects in our cluster (BrainAble and Better), and the Tobi workshop in Graz in Feb 2010, where we also had our Future BNCI poster. The talk and poster contain information about our cluster partners, not just this project. We also gave our talk about Future BNCI to various laboratories and research groups, and produced some peer-reviewed papers.
Also, this web page is a major dissemination activity. We were required to have an infrastructure in place in Feb 2010, and flesh it out and send a major email announcement by April 30. We attained these goals.
Final report
The final report from the FBNCI project is available for download. Please click here for a pdf version, or click here for an html version.
Further accomplishments
