Ethical Questions on Brain Computer Interface, by Paul Root Wolpe

Paul Root Wolpe had a talk "It's time to questions bio-engineering" on TED.

In the talk, there are applications of Brain Computer Interface (BCI):

• Monkey controls robotic arm with brain computer interface. The monkey sits in a room watching monitor and are put on EEG electrodes. In other room, there are robotic arm and camera. The monkey can see from the monitor what happens to robotic arm in the other room through camera. First, the monkey moves his own arm and robotic arm will make the same movement. After some repetitions, the monkey stops moving his arm and the robotic arm moves with the monkey's will.
• Flies and other insects are put on a chip to their "brain". Then engineers can control the insects to fly with a remote control. Infact, engineers and scientist have made breakthrough with mammals: rats. Here animals are losing the autonomy of their bodies. There are ethical questions on consciousness and autonomy.
• Eels' brain is put in gel which is put on electrodes. This bio-electronic system is put in a mobile robot as the main controller. The robot has a sensor and wheels. The robot can move toward the light although there are no programming codes to do so. A robot which is directly controlled by brain. (My notes: other researchers in different countries have successfully use rat brain tissues, see here)

Enjoy the video:

http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_root_wolpe_it_s_time_to_question_bio_engineering.html

 

Nürnberg, 26 Februari 2012

iscab.saptocondro

 

 

Bandung Brain Computer Interface

This is a short video of Brain Computer Interface research in Bandung, Indonesia.

The research is conducted in the School of Electrical Engineering and Informatics (STEI) in Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB).

 

iscab.saptocondro

Standard 10-20 system EEG & me

My head

standard 10-20 system of electrode placement for EEG 

Some scientific papers mentioning me and Brain-Computer Interface

I had involved in Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) research for 2 years. The research was done while studying in the University of Bremen. Now I have got M.Sc. degree in Information and Automation Engineering. After the end of my master study, there have been one master thesis, one master project report and 2 scientific papers related to BCI and me.

***

The master project report

Title: Final Preparation of the CeBit Data

author: Ignatius Sapto Condro Atmawan (That's me!)

supervisors: Prof. Dr.-Ing Axel Gräser & Dr.-Ing Ivan Volosyak

year: 2009

place: Institute für Automatissierungstechnik (IAT), Universität Bremen, Bremen, Germany

about:

The master project is mainly about EEG data format in the IAT. The BrainRobot group from the IAT conducted experiments about steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEP) in CeBit 2008, Hannover and RehaCare 2008, Düsseldorf, Germany. Both experiments used different data formats. The project report mentions other alternatives of data format which have already been international standards or at least european ones: GDF, EDF, BDF and BKR.

Other data format which are not mentioned in the report can be found here:

• BioSig
• scientific data formats

The Master Thesis

Title: Improvement of Response Time in SSVEP-based Brain-Computer Interface

author: Ignatius Sapto Condro Atmawan Bisawarna (That's me!)

supervisors: Prof. Dr.-Ing Axel Gräser, Dr.-Ing Ivan Volosyak & Thorsten Lüth, Dipl.-Ing.

year: 2010

place: Institute für Automatissierungstechnik (IAT), Universität Bremen, Bremen, Germany

about:

This master thesis is about how to make SSVEP-based BCI in the IAT faster (but with less error). A few time series prediction algorithms are then used. There were simulation with MATLAB, programming with C++, using BCI2000 platform and doing EEG experiments with human subjects. In the end, the proposed algorithms to help IAT system detect SSVEP faster are Regression method and Kalman Filter.

***

You can send email to saptocondro@ieee.org for more information and also the pdf files of my master project report and my master thesis.

***

The scientific paper mentioning me as an author

Title: BCI Demographics: How many (and what kinds of) people can use an SSVEP BCI?

author: B. Allison, I. Volosyak, T. Lüth, D. Valbuena, I. Sugiarto, M.A. Spiegel, A. Teymourian, I.S. Condro (That's me!), A. Brindusescu, K. Stenzel, H. Cecotti & A. Gräser.

Proc. 4th International Brain-Computer Interface Workshop and Training Course.

date: September 18-21, 2008

where: Graz, Austria

pages: 333-338

The scientific paper mentioning me in the acknowledgement

Title: BCI Demographics: How many (and what kinds of) people can use an SSVEP BCI?

author: B. Allison, T. Lüth, D. Valbuena, A. Teymourian, I. Volosyak & A. Gräser

journal: IEEE Transaction on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering

date: April 2010

volume: 18

number: 2

pages: 107-116

ISSN:1534-4320

The link to this paper can be found here.

***

I hope someday I can be an author in IEEE Transactions, especially the first author.

The perception of scenes with natural light

This Monday, on January 18th, 2010, I came to another neuroscience colloquium in Cognium. The talk is presented by Prof. Dr. Tom Troscianko from the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Bristol, UK.

The title of the talk is "The perception of scenes with natural light".

The talk is about the visual perception of animals (Homo Sapiens included) as they see some scenes with natural light, in this case is sun light.

The first part of the talk is about the visual perception of primates and some birds: How primate see fruit, how about birds. Some models are shown in the slides. What happened with the monochromatic animals (you can say color blind)? Most primates are not color blind so they can see the contrast better than the birds. The first part is mainly about the perception of colors and contrast. Pictures and their histogram were shown in the talk.

The second part is about the effect of shadow. Can human perceive shadow from natural light and from manipulated image? And how fast?

The first experiment is shadow direction. There are pictures of standing cylinders and their shadow with the "light source" from above. Which shadow has wrong direction?

Then the picture is rotated upside down. Which shadow has wrong direction?

Eye movement and time are measured.

It happened that humans are faster with the light source from below. Human is not aware with the light source from above, for example sun light.

The third part is about the estethic perception. In this part, the talk is about the visual perception of sunset. Is sunset beautiful? Why do people like sunset? Can we measure the beauty of the sunset?

Google give more than 40 millions results for sunset and more than 30 millions results for sunset pictures.

There are also experiments on a ship. People gathers more on the side of a ship where they can see a sunset.

There are two conditions in sunset. When the sun is high, there is Rayleigh scattering of sunlight. The sky looks red at that time. When the sun is low, very near horizon, there is Mie Scattering of sunlight. The sky looks blue with the horizon looks red and yellow.

The experiment is conducted the eye movement.

The result shows that when the sun is high, human prefer to see the sun in the sunset, not the halo or the red sky. On the contrary, after the sun reaches the horizon, human prefer to see the halo and the sky. From this experiment, the "beauty" of the sunset can be measured.

So the whole talk is about the perception of color and contrast, shadow and the esthetic. We can know the research interest of Prof. Troscianko from here.

***

Next talk will be interesting. It will be on February 1st, 2010. It is about neuroethic. The title will be "Von der Neuroethik zur Bewusstseinsethik". Well, reading "mind" can lead to some ethical problems. I will make another blog post of the next talk.

Improvement of Response Times in SSVEP-based Brain-Computer Interface

Starting on December 10th, 2009, I have a master thesis. The thesis should be submitted on May 27th, 2010. The presentation will be conducted in June (I hope).

The title of thesis is "Improvement of Response Times in SSVEP-based Brain-Computer Interface".

The supervisors are

• Prof. Dr.-Ing Axel Gräser
• Dr.-Ing. Ivan Volosyak
• Thorsten Lüth, Dipl.-Ing

The thesis is conducted in the Institute of Automation (IAT) at the University of Bremen.

The research group is no longer called BrainRobot. The name is now BRAIN, which stands for Brain-computer interfaces with Rapid Automated Interfaces for Nonexperts.

Yes, it is funded by European Union. We want to keep up with all research groups in the USA (and Canada) and in the Asia Pasific (China, Japan, Korea, etc).

Back to my thesis!

The proposed question behind the thesis is whether we can improve response times of our system in detecting SSVEP patterns from a subject. We can say that I want to make Bremen BCI system (a little bit) faster than before. I am using time-series manipulation algorithm to do so.

More details will be told in other blog posts.

A Bayesian model of Attentional Load

Last monday, 7th December 2009, I came to another talk in the Cognium building of the University of Bremen. The talk is presented by Prof. Dr. Peter Dayan, from Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, Alexandra House, London. The talk title is "A Bayesian Model of Attentional Load".

I did not understand the talk much. It was about statistic, mostly Bayesian (of course). Basically, we have attention. EEG signals are then classified, based on Bayesian method. I am sorry I really couldn't get the idea of the talk.

I keep the presenter's name and the talk title in order to have a contact if I want to continue Ph.D. next year (2010).