Sunday, January 1, 2012
Saturday, December 11, 2010
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.
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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
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:
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
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?
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.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
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.
Monday, December 14, 2009
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).
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).
Saturday, December 5, 2009
A High-Throughput Screening Approach to Discovering Good Forms of Biologically Inspired Visual Representation
"A High-Throughput Screening Approach to Discovering Good Forms of Biologically Inspired Visual Representation" is the title of a paper from MIT and Harvard researcher. The paper can be downloaded from The PLoS Computational Biology. It is about brain modelling. They want to model the how our brain process visual information. The hardware used is GPU (graphical processing unit).
They publish the video which can be seen here. In the video you can see their comments about IBM cat brain. They say implicitly that IBM one do have the power of cat brain but it is not successful (yet) to model how the cat brain works. The same news from Smart Planet can be read here.
***
***
Other interesting news recently is about Intel processor with 48 cores. Actually it is 24 dual core connected in mesh network. Beside GPU, this 48-core processor can be used also for brain modeling.
Are we closed to Singularity?
They publish the video which can be seen here. In the video you can see their comments about IBM cat brain. They say implicitly that IBM one do have the power of cat brain but it is not successful (yet) to model how the cat brain works. The same news from Smart Planet can be read here.
***
Finding a better way for computers to "see" from Cox Lab @ Rowland Institute on Vimeo.
***
Other interesting news recently is about Intel processor with 48 cores. Actually it is 24 dual core connected in mesh network. Beside GPU, this 48-core processor can be used also for brain modeling.
Are we closed to Singularity?
Brain, Movement, and Space-Time Perception
Last Monday, 30th November 2009, I went to a talk in Cognium again. Unlike the previous talk, I was early then. I could pick a good seat.
There were 2 presenters: Prof. Dr. David Burr and Dr. Maria C. Morrone.
Both are from Instituto di Neuroscienze del CNR, Pisa, Italien.
Maria C. Morrone presented "Time & Space in the brain for different frames of reference".
David Burr presented "Cross model sensory fusion & calibration: evidence from development, On Bishops & Babies".
***
The first presentation was from Dr. Morrone about time perception, the space perception of our surrounding and the posture of movement of our body and body part, e.g. hand or head. I am not a neurobiologist, so I could not comprehend a lot of vocabularies: retinal snap shot, retinotopic map, allocentric map, ipsilateral vs controlateral, spatiotopic vs retinotopic, craniotopic vs dermotopic and so on. There were many graphics showing correlations and areas of brain. Also the presentation was too fast and in english with italian accent. It was awful for me.
In the end, I can understand only the conclusion about the link between action and time (perception).
Time perception of human brain depends on the posture. If we change our coordinate (e.g. posture), our "internal clock" change. Time perception is highly plastic.
I remember a quote about time perception:
"Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT's relativity." (Albert Einstein)
***
The second presentation was more interesting. Prof. Burr talked about the way we use our sense to have a space perception. Is our perception robust? How do we develop robust perception through the year?
We use haptic and visual information to explore our world. We see something to guess the size and we touch itu to have the idea of the size. Based on two sensors, our brain process information about the size of a thing. We have more senses to explore space by adding auditory information: sounds. Not only size, we also get idea of space based on our sense of orientation.
Prof. Burr showed an interesting research about the robustness of our perception.
What happens if we see something blurry but we can still touch it?
What happens if we have conflict of direction between eyes and ears?
Fusion of our sense can make better precision. Precision means that the resulting position from our visual sense and our haptic sense (and also other sense) is closed each other. We use all of our senses to get a precise space (and time) perception.
Calibration can make better accuracy. Accuracy means that our sense points close to the targeted position. Which sense calibrate other sense?
A subject should differentiate size of many boxes. Two boxes are put separately by a piece of wood. The subject only see one side of wood with one box. The other box is behind. The subject should see one box and touch the front box and the back box. Combinations of boxes are changing. The subject is supposed to tell which one is big and not.
And then, we make a blurry obstacles so our visual perception is disturbed. Is the subject still good with the task?
After the size, the subject should differentiate orientation. The boxes can be twisted. If we twist the front box, the back box also twist because both are connected. The conflict arise when those two boxes have different angle so it is not parallel. So front and back boxes have orientation conflict. What is the effect with and without blurry obstacles then?
Another experiment is to see a circular dot on screen of television. There are also two speakers: left and right. The dot can be move on screen. Sometimes it is blurry. The speaker can blip. Sometimes it blip consistently, which means if the dot on the left, the left speaker make a sound. But there is also visual and auditory conflict.
The subjects are from different ages.
What is the result?
The 5-year-old subject have problems with conflict of sense and with obstacles. And then as human grows our perception get more robust. A ten-year-old and grown-up subject has a robust perception. They can have a consistent (robust) sense of size and orientation although blurry obstacles are put or audiovisual conflict is put.
If we calibrate position to have a time-space perception, we use the most robust sense. The most robust sense calibrate the other sense.
Other question is how about blind people.
It turns out that blind subject can do well to sense size but they are bad with orientation. Prof Burr concluded that the lack of calibrating sense (vision) at early age impacts on touch.
It is hard to understand this presentation. Both presenters were really fast. One used italian accent and the other used australian accent. Pictures shows better than words and unfortunately I can only write in this blog.
***
Next monday, there is another presentation: "A Bayesian Model of Attentional Load"
Can't wait to see what it will be.
There were 2 presenters: Prof. Dr. David Burr and Dr. Maria C. Morrone.
Both are from Instituto di Neuroscienze del CNR, Pisa, Italien.
Maria C. Morrone presented "Time & Space in the brain for different frames of reference".
David Burr presented "Cross model sensory fusion & calibration: evidence from development, On Bishops & Babies".
***
The first presentation was from Dr. Morrone about time perception, the space perception of our surrounding and the posture of movement of our body and body part, e.g. hand or head. I am not a neurobiologist, so I could not comprehend a lot of vocabularies: retinal snap shot, retinotopic map, allocentric map, ipsilateral vs controlateral, spatiotopic vs retinotopic, craniotopic vs dermotopic and so on. There were many graphics showing correlations and areas of brain. Also the presentation was too fast and in english with italian accent. It was awful for me.
In the end, I can understand only the conclusion about the link between action and time (perception).
Time perception of human brain depends on the posture. If we change our coordinate (e.g. posture), our "internal clock" change. Time perception is highly plastic.
I remember a quote about time perception:
"Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT's relativity." (Albert Einstein)
***
The second presentation was more interesting. Prof. Burr talked about the way we use our sense to have a space perception. Is our perception robust? How do we develop robust perception through the year?
We use haptic and visual information to explore our world. We see something to guess the size and we touch itu to have the idea of the size. Based on two sensors, our brain process information about the size of a thing. We have more senses to explore space by adding auditory information: sounds. Not only size, we also get idea of space based on our sense of orientation.
Prof. Burr showed an interesting research about the robustness of our perception.
What happens if we see something blurry but we can still touch it?
What happens if we have conflict of direction between eyes and ears?
Fusion of our sense can make better precision. Precision means that the resulting position from our visual sense and our haptic sense (and also other sense) is closed each other. We use all of our senses to get a precise space (and time) perception.
Calibration can make better accuracy. Accuracy means that our sense points close to the targeted position. Which sense calibrate other sense?
A subject should differentiate size of many boxes. Two boxes are put separately by a piece of wood. The subject only see one side of wood with one box. The other box is behind. The subject should see one box and touch the front box and the back box. Combinations of boxes are changing. The subject is supposed to tell which one is big and not.
And then, we make a blurry obstacles so our visual perception is disturbed. Is the subject still good with the task?
After the size, the subject should differentiate orientation. The boxes can be twisted. If we twist the front box, the back box also twist because both are connected. The conflict arise when those two boxes have different angle so it is not parallel. So front and back boxes have orientation conflict. What is the effect with and without blurry obstacles then?
Another experiment is to see a circular dot on screen of television. There are also two speakers: left and right. The dot can be move on screen. Sometimes it is blurry. The speaker can blip. Sometimes it blip consistently, which means if the dot on the left, the left speaker make a sound. But there is also visual and auditory conflict.
The subjects are from different ages.
What is the result?
The 5-year-old subject have problems with conflict of sense and with obstacles. And then as human grows our perception get more robust. A ten-year-old and grown-up subject has a robust perception. They can have a consistent (robust) sense of size and orientation although blurry obstacles are put or audiovisual conflict is put.
If we calibrate position to have a time-space perception, we use the most robust sense. The most robust sense calibrate the other sense.
Other question is how about blind people.
It turns out that blind subject can do well to sense size but they are bad with orientation. Prof Burr concluded that the lack of calibrating sense (vision) at early age impacts on touch.
It is hard to understand this presentation. Both presenters were really fast. One used italian accent and the other used australian accent. Pictures shows better than words and unfortunately I can only write in this blog.
***
Next monday, there is another presentation: "A Bayesian Model of Attentional Load"
Can't wait to see what it will be.
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