Direct Neural Interface

BrainGate2 clinical trial is go

2009-06-10T21:46:00.004-04:00

That's right! Everyone's favorite Neural Interface System, filled to the brim with Brain-Computer Interfaceyness, BrainGate, is continuing clinical trials, sans Cyberkinetics. Massachusetts General Hospital will serve as the home base, with close ties to Brown and Harvard universities and the Providence VA Hospital. Leigh Hochberg takes the helm as PI and lead investigator along with John Donoghue. The project is being called BrainGate2 in part to denote advancement in the systems, techniques and understanding used in designing and implementing an NIS. People looking for more information, including participant enrollment, can check out the below links and Braingate2.org.

Clinical trials page on BrainGate2.org website
ClinicalTrials.gov entry

Brown University release
GenEngNews article
Boston Globe article
Providence Journal article
PhysOrg article

Reddit catch
Twitter catches

Meta again - site changes

2009-06-04T14:17:00.003-04:00

I know posting to the site about the site is getting old, but I'm swamped with work and want to make sure people know I haven't abandoned it. So...

Updated look: I changed some the design a tad - now wider and less crammed looking (that's the default for Blogger, so let me know if it messes anything up). Now it's displaying at 1000 pixels wide, which should alleviate the cut off photo/video problems. I might make it a point to do a weekly visual refresh and add a few elements here and there. The way it is now is now how I 'want' it to be, but it was a quick fix that made it better than before and got the ball rolling (hopefully).

Twitter: Recent tweets added to the right column. I'll be adding some more social engineerin... er social services type things in the future. Honestly, i thought Twitter was going to be annoying, and so far it has taken the place of little things I might have mentioned on the blog, but without the feeling that I need to write a page about said thing.

RSS feeds: These are going to remain 'organic'. By that I mean I will be constantly trying to improve them. I like the categories I have setup now, so what is there will stay there, but I will possibly be adding more or removing others, so check back for updates (I won't be announcing them in posts from now on). Feeds that have proven themselves worthy will be listed in the sidebar as 'stable' and others will be listed as 'trial'. For example, I'm really liking some of the data visualization stuff I've come across, but it doesn't fit in any one category, so I might add a feed for that.

Super Paper Friday: Several things.

SPF, as mentioned in the previous post, is now on Mendeley, with the citations in line here.
I will be switching to an every other week schedule for posting SPF.
Papers will remain on Mendeley for ~3 months in order to keep the account quota usage reasonable. After 3 months, I will be removing the pdf links, but keeping the citations there. If you join the shared group, just drag the citations you want over to your library and the pdfs should follow, so it isn't the case that you would lose access to the pdfs.
Mendeley currently has a 7 person limit on shared groups. To get around this I will add groups with the same papers as the community grows. Chances are good that by the time this becomes a hassle, the limit will be raised (already asked about this and it looks like it will be soon).

As always, any feedback is appreciated!

SPF - now with PDFs!

2009-05-23T15:54:00.000-04:00

It's special because it is being posted on Saturday! Just kidding.

Let's see how this works...

Super Paper Friday is live... on Mendeley! That's right! I know, I know, it took me long enough, but not only are the citations up, but so are the PDFs. This is much, much easier for me, and gets me into some better habits in regards to keeping my papers organized. This SPF is one week delayed, so the papers are not from the current week. I was trying to make sure the PubMed info is updated - the PubMed info for papers on the day they are released is sometimes non-existent or lacking info.

So, how do you get access?

First, sign up for Mendeley. No, this isn't all a ploy to up user registration. Believe me. I see how many hits DNI gets, and it would be a drop in the bucket. There are 1,000,000 articles on Mendeley, and from the blog:
90% of these one million articles have been uploaded since January 2009, and our database is currently doubling in size every 6 weeks. For comparison, venerable PubMed - the largest database of biomedical literature - contains 18,813,527 records as of today. Assuming we managed to keep up our growth, we could surpass the size of the PubMed database within the next 6 months!

I will post a detailed rundown of my workflow when compiling literature lists soon, possibly over the weekend, so you can see it from my perspective.
Find my Mendeley profile. Hint: It's here. Click "Add contact". Type something in there like, "Gimme mah SPF, ya bastid!"
I will get a notification. I will cry because the above message was so harsh and I thought we had a good thing going. I will wipe away the tears, and try to win you back by adding you to the shared group list.
The group will appear in your shared group list. If you have the desktop client, it will fetch the PDFs automatically.
You will receive a notification that I added you, at which point you will burst into The Happy Dance. Yays!

Note that you don't have to download the client program, but I would totally recommend it. Totally, yes.

As of right now, there's no way to define custom citation styles, which is what I was using in EndNote to post the direct links, so the below list lacks links. (Yes, I am leaving you to copy and paste the title into Google or PubMed if you don't go the Mendeley route. You poor overworked soul.) Once that feature is added, I will resume using the previous format with nice, convenient links. If this really irks you, I'm sure you are smart enough to know that the right click menu over selected text will let you search for that text. Not a big deal.

Aggarwal V, Singhal G, He J, Schieber MH, Thakor NV (2008) Towards closed-loop decoding of dexterous hand movements using a virtual integration environment. Conference proceedings : ... Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Conference 2008:1703-6

Aghagolzadeh M, Shetliffe M, Oweiss KG (2008) Impact of compressed sensing of motor cortical activity on spike train decoding in Brain Machine Interfaces. Conference proceedings : ... Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Conference 2008:5302-5

Ajiboye AB, Weir RF (2009) Muscle synergies as a predictive framework for the EMG patterns of new hand postures. Journal of neural engineering 6:36004

Albert NB, Robertson EM, Miall RC (2009) The Resting Human Brain and Motor Learning. Current biology : CB:1-5

Bishop W, Yu BM, Santhanam G, Afshar A, Ryu SI, Shenoy KV, Vogelstein RJ, Beaty J, Harshbarger S (2008) The use of a virtual integration environment for the real-time implementation of neural decode algorithms. Conference proceedings : ... Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Conference 2008:628-33

Bradberry TJ, Contreras-Vidal JL, Rong F (2008) Decoding hand and cursor kinematics from magnetoencephalographic signals during tool use. Conference proceedings : ... Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Conference 2008:5306-9

Bradi AC, Adam JJ, Fischer MH, Pratt J (2009) Modulating Fitts's Law: the effect of disappearing allocentric information. Experimental brain research. Experimentelle Hirnforschung. Expérimentation cérébrale 194:571-6

Brinkmann BH, Bower MR, Stengel KA, Worrell GA, Stead M (2009) Large-scale electrophysiology: acquisition, compression, encryption, and storage of big data. Journal of neuroscience methods 180:185-92

Cardin JA, Carlén M, Meletis K, Knoblich U, Zhang F, Deisseroth K, Tsai L, Moore CI (2009) Driving fast-spiking cells induces gamma rhythm and controls sensory responses. Nature:1-6

Cattaneo L, Rizzolatti G (2009) The mirror neuron system. Archives of neurology 66:557-60

Danziger Z, Fishbach A, Mussa-Ivaldi FA (2008) Adapting human-machine interfaces to user performance. Conference proceedings : ... Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Conference 2008:4486-90

Desmurget M, Reilly KT, Richard N, Szathmari A, Mottolese C, Sirigu A (2009) Movement intention after parietal cortex stimulation in humans. Science (New York, N.Y.) 324:811-3

Dye MW, Green CS, Bavelier D (2009) The development of attention skills in action video game players. Neuropsychologia 47:1780-9

Eldawlatly S, Jin R, Oweiss KG (2008) Identifying Functional Connectivity in Large-Scale Neural Ensemble Recordings: A Multiscale Data Mining Approach. Neural computation 21:450-77

Fukayama O, Taniguchi N, Suzuki T, Mabuchi K (2008) RatCar system for estimating locomotion states using neural signals with parameter monitoring: Vehicle-formed brain-machine interfaces for rat. Conference proceedings : ... Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Conference 2008:5322-5

Gallivan JP, Cavina-Pratesi C, Culham JC (2009) Is that within reach? fMRI reveals that the human superior parieto-occipital cortex encodes objects reachable by the hand. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience 29:4381-91

Gilio F, Iacovelli E, Frasca V, Gabriele M, Giacomelli E, De Lena C, Cipriani AM, Inghilleri M (2009) Electrical and magnetic repetitive transcranial stimulation of the primary motor cortex in healthy subjects. Neuroscience letters 455:1-3

Gunduz A, Sanchez JC, Principe JC (2008) Electrocorticographic interictal spike removal via denoising source separation for improved neuroprosthesis control. Conference proceedings : ... Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Conference 2008:5224-7

Han X, Qian X, Bernstein JG, Zhou H, Franzesi GT, Stern P, Bronson RT, Graybiel AM, Desimone R, Boyden ES (2009) Millisecond-timescale optical control of neural dynamics in the nonhuman primate brain. Neuron 62:191-8

Jung P, Ziemann U (2009) Homeostatic and nonhomeostatic modulation of learning in human motor cortex. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience 29:5597-604

Kiani R, Shadlen MN (2009) Representation of confidence associated with a decision by neurons in the parietal cortex. Science (New York, N.Y.) 324:759-64

Kositsky M, Chiappalone M, Alford ST, Mussa-Ivaldi FA (2009) Brain-machine interactions for assessing the dynamics of neural systems. Frontiers in neurorobotics 3:1

Liddle EB, Scerif G, Hollis CP, Batty MJ, Groom MJ, Liotti M, Liddle PF (2009) Looking before you leap: A theory of motivated control of action. Cognition

Mugge W, Schuurmans J, Schouten AC, van Der Helm FC (2009) Sensory weighting of force and position feedback in human motor control tasks. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience 29:5476-82

Ramanathan D, Tuszynski MH, Conner JM (2009) The basal forebrain cholinergic system is required specifically for behaviorally mediated cortical map plasticity. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience 29:5992-6000

Salinas E (2009) Rank-order-selective neurons form a temporal basis set for the generation of motor sequences. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience 29:4369-80

Sincich LC, Horton JC, Sharpee TO (2009) Preserving information in neural transmission. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience 29:6207-16

Slutzky MW, Jordan LR, Miller LE (2008) Optimal spatial resolution of epidural and subdural electrode arrays for brain-machine interface applications. Conference proceedings : ... Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Conference 2008:3771-4

Smith WS, Fetz EE (2009) Synaptic Interactions Between Forelimb-related Motor Cortex Neurons in Behaving Primates. Journal of neurophysiology

Takahashi YK, Roesch MR, Stalnaker TA, Haney RZ, Calu DJ, Taylor AR, Burke KA, Schoenbaum G (2009) The orbitofrontal cortex and ventral tegmental area are necessary for learning from unexpected outcomes. Neuron 62:269-80

Thakor NV (2008) Neuroengineering: building interfaces from neurons to brain. Conference proceedings : ... Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Conference 2008:1602-3

Tomi N, Gouko M, Ito K (2008) Impedance control complements incomplete internal models under complex external dynamics. Conference proceedings : ... Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Conference 2008:5354-7

Tunik E, Houk JC, Grafton ST (2009) Basal Ganglia Contribution To The Initiation Of Corrective Submovements. NeuroImage

Tziridis K, Dicke PW, Thier P (2009) The role of the monkey dorsal pontine nuclei in goal-directed eye and hand movements. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience 29:6154-66

Wang Y, Principe JC (2008) Tracking the non-stationary neuron tuning by dual Kalman filter for brain machine interfaces decoding. Conference proceedings : ... Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Conference 2008:1720-3

Wolynski B, Schott BH, Kanowski M, Hoffmann MB (2009) Visuo-motor integration in humans: cortical patterns of response lateralisation and functional connectivity. Neuropsychologia 47:1313-22

Zhao M, Rattanatamrong P, DiGiovanna J, Mahmoudi B, Figueiredo RJ, Sanchez JC, Príncipe JC, Fortes JA (2008) BMI cyberworkstation: enabling dynamic data-driven brain-machine interface research through cyberinfrastructure. Conference proceedings : ... Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Conference 2008:646-9

Very special Super Paper Firday coming

2009-05-21T14:23:00.003-04:00

Big, awesome change coming to SPF. Yer gonna like it.

Also, that you for the kind compliments regarding DNI from the folks that spoke to JPD at the neurotech conference earlier this month.

Feed tweak

2009-05-10T10:33:00.004-04:00

Just a note: I'm going to make a couple small changes to the RSS feeds, outlined below:

Papers: Now, Papers will be the only feed with, er, papers (besides Noteworthy News). It will only have papers, no stories. This feed will be purged (items removed) as papers are consolidated into Super Paper Fridays.

Video and Audio: Removing this feed.

'Shared' items (BCI News): Okay, I misunderstood this, somewhat. If you just want everything - every feed without duplicates plus posts on DNI - this is what you want.

'Starred' items (Noteworthy News): This is going to expand to include anything big/important and papers that appear will not be purged with SPF.

Social media note: All DNI original posts are being cross posted to Twitter and FriendFeed, along with each "shared with note" story - shared items that I specifically commented on. This adds a layer of complexity, but it is what it is. Starred items are also cross-posted to Twitter and FriendFeed.

Remember that you can mix and match feeds, too, with Yahoo Pipes. Simple example below (merging 3 of the feeds into a single one):

Hang in there!

2009-05-10T10:11:00.005-04:00

I've had an unexpected family issue that has taken precedence over DNI, but things should be back to normal soon. (I know, bad form with the picture, but no reason you shouldn't be entertained!) I swear, one thing after another, after another... This little roller coaster over the last month has been exceptionally bipolar (all the events, not just this one), and all my side projects have had to take a back seat (Digital Trends, Mendeley, DNI, and few others included), but don't worry. DNI is still here. I feel it is important to at least give updates when these little lapses occur, so people know that I haven't abandoned them.

That said, I am currently looking into a massively cool relaunch-type event/design/thing. This includes paper sharing, social media, new resources, etc. so stay tuned (not a service, like Mendeley, per say, but tying BCI communities and resources together a little better). Thus far, DNI has been a little experiment in neuro-y, research-y, tech-y stream of consciousness - as I hit on something quick and easy to implement, I've tried throwing it into the mix. The relaunch will be much more reasoned and deliberate. My first task will be to find a way to stretch 24 hours into something close to 24^10 hours, so I can fit everything in... :)

So, sit back, enjoy the feeds, catch a tweet here and there. I'm focusing attention on keeping up with the Papers stream.

Calling out the impostor

2009-05-02T03:53:00.006-04:00

If you are familiar with BCIs you probably have heard of the project I work on, called BrainGate. I'm a grad student in John Donoghue's lab, though the thoughts and opinions on DNI are entirely my own. I generally try to keep all things related to the 'project' at a very superficial level, due to the FDA/patient confidentiality/my generally responsible nature, and report on news items there as I do with any other project (when they hit the mainstream news agencies).

But, there was something brought to my attention the other day regarding our project that I think needs to be examined. Apparently, someone with no affiliation to the project, no interaction with anyone on the project, and obviously no scruples owns the top level domain (TLD) for the project's name. I'm not going to link to it, since this poser doesn't deserve any traffic, but I wanted to put out the word to the core BCI researchers, students, and labs that keep up with DNI, that http://www.braingate2.org is the ONLY official site for the project. (Yes, that is just a placeholder page with a few links, and the full launch will be mentioned here.)

The BrainFake site, as I will now refer to our charlatan friend, isn't particularly 'bad', I mean, at least he links to the real site under the clinical trials section, but essentially we have someone confusing people interested in the project, stealing attention, providing unverified information, and just generally passing themselves off as the real deal. This is probably one of those people that just went and registered swineflu.com so he could redirect traffic to his lucrative online natural Viagra website, so we're talking parasitic to the nth degree and not some scientist I just happen to disagree with.

Anyone have any ideas on how to deal with this type of situation? My usual inclination is to use 'hired thugs', but that route always seems to get voted down by others. (obviously kidding)

Social adjustment

2009-05-01T11:29:00.004-04:00

I was dragged into the Twitterverse kicking and screaming, but the unthinkable has happened. Actually, so far I like it. The signal to noise ratio is pretty poor, but not as bad as I expected. Then again, I have very few people that I'm following.

So, follow me, kids!

Twitter: xbkingx
Friendfeed: xbkingx

These are general accounts related to whatever hits me as interesting, so not just BCI items.

Catching up

2009-04-29T14:04:00.002-04:00

Yeah, I loooove to see "1000+" next to my rss feed subfolders... ugh. Catching up on news items slowly, but going to try to be back at a regular clip this weekend. Prelim done, need to update a few research related doohickies, Mendeley thingamabobs, film project whatsits, and organize all the junk that has been piling up the last couple weeks. Whee! Fun!

As a side note, I love Amtrak. Get there 10 minutes beforehand, no lines, power adapters, leg room, smooth riding, jeez. I think I am a total rail convert. No worrying about laptop batteries running low or turning them on and off during take off and landing. Just though I would share the love.

One more thing...

2009-04-15T16:05:00.001-04:00

Papers feed is live, and has been added to the list on the right. Or click here.

A week away

2009-04-15T15:25:00.003-04:00

So, I underestimated the amount of work leading up to my prelim defense, and going to start my little break now-ish. It isn't the prelim work as much as the other stuff, like my little Thunderbird on a USB stick took forever to configure perfectly, and was then corrupted by an old version of TrueCrypt hiding on one of my computers. *poof* All that work disappeared. Ugh. Not sure how to handle that now, but might have to think up a little hack to make it work properly.

In the meantime, here are a few stories...

Serious:
60 Minutes covered DEKA on Sunday. Thank you to the 20-ish people that let me know about it, including my parents. They're silly. They still live in a world where missing a TV show means you have to wait for the rerun. Video clip is up on the 60 Minutes site.

This best computer interfaces story is a trip down memory lane.

Pravda has a very vague and almost not worth reading article on a Russian BCI group.

The Boston Globe discusses some of the hurdles of setting up an implantable BCI project, and chronicles the situation over at the now defunct Cyberkinetics. I don't want to say anything about the project that could anger one of the 14,000 government institutions regulating aspects of it (kidding on the number btw), so I will point to here (yes, the page is in a very very early alpha state).

And some sort of licensing setup for ECoG algorithms has been setup with a company called Neurolutions. (Really? Neurolutions? Have we gotten to the point where all the good brain related names are taken? Even DNI, which was a 3am, caffeine-induced hyper-mania induced naming beats the snot out of that.)

Seriously?:
I could bring myself to watch this clip, but here's the title:
"Robotic baby seal has healing powers" - CNN (also known as, "We fired out entire science department, but what could go wrong?" News)
Video clip. Be sure to get the tshirt, too.

Mini Super Paper Friday

2009-04-10T12:12:00.003-04:00

Since I have been behind on my feeds, just an abbreviated SPF today. EndNote file available here.

Beurze, S. M., De Lange, F. P., Toni, I. and Medendorp, W. P. Spatial and effector processing in the human parietofrontal network for reaches and saccades. Journal of neurophysiology, (2009).
Link.

Blana, D., Kirsch, R. and Chadwick, E. Combined feedforward and feedback control of a redundant, nonlinear, dynamic musculoskeletal system. Medical & biological engineering & computing, (2009).
Link.

Chib, V. S., Krutky, M. A., Lynch, K. M. and Mussa-ivaldi, F. A. The separate neural control of hand movements and contact forces. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience 29, 29-29, (2009).
Link.

Churchland, P. S. and Phil, B. The significance of neuroscience for philosophy. Functional neurology 23, 23-23.
Link.

Corradi-Dell'Acqua, C., Tomasino, B. and Fink, G. R. What is the position of an arm relative to the body? Neural correlates of body schema and body structural description. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience 29, 29-29, (2009).
Link.

Cunningham, J. P., Gilja, V., Ryu, S. I. and Shenoy, K. V. Methods for estimating neural firing rates, and their application to brain-machine interfaces. Neural networks : the official journal of the International Neural Network Society, (2009).
Link.

Dietrich, A. Imaging the imagination: the trouble with motor imagery. Methods (San Diego, Calif.) 45, 45-45, (2008).
Link.

Dockendorf, K. P., Park, I., He, P., Principe, J. C. and DeMarse, T. B. Liquid state machines and cultured cortical networks: the separation property. Bio Systems 95, 95-95, (2009).
Link.

Fekete, T., Pitowsky, I., Grinvald, A. and Omer, D. Arousal increases the representational capacity of cortical tissue. Journal of computational neuroscience, (2009).
Link.

Friedman, A., Frankel, M., Flaumenhaft, Y., Merenlender, A., Pinhasov, A., Feder, Y., Taler, M., Gil-Ad, I., Abeles, M. and Yadid, G. Programmed acute electrical stimulation of ventral tegmental area alleviates depressive-like behavior. Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology 34, 34-34, (2009).
Link.

Fuentes, R., Petersson, P., Siesser, W. B., Caron, M. G. and Nicolelis, M. A. L. Spinal cord stimulation restores locomotion in animal models of Parkinson's disease. Science (New York, N.Y.) 323, 323-323, (2009).
Link.

Graziano, A. and Jones, E. G. Early withdrawal of axons from higher centers in response to peripheral somatosensory denervation. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience 29, 29-29, (2009).
Link.

Inuggi, A., Amato, N., Magnani, G., González-Rosa, J. J., Chieffo, R., Comi, G. and Leocani, L. Cortical control of unilateral simple movement in healthy aging. Neurobiology of aging, (2009).
Link.

Koulakov, A. A., Hromadka, T. and Zador, A. M. Correlated connectivity and the distribution of firing rates in the neocortex. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience 29, 29-29, (2009).
Link.

Lee, J.-H., Ryu, J., Jolesz, F. A., Cho, Z.-H. and Yoo, S.-S. Brain-machine interface via real-time fMRI: preliminary study on thought-controlled robotic arm. Neuroscience letters 450, 450-450, (2009).
Link.

Lonini, L., Dipietro, L., Zollo, L., Guglielmelli, E. and Krebs, H. I. An Internal Model for Acquisition and Retention of Motor Learning During Arm Reaching. Neural computation, (2009).
Link.

Majdandzic, J., Bekkering, H., Van Schie, H. T. and Toni, I. Movement-Specific Repetition Suppression in Ventral and Dorsal Premotor Cortex during Action Observation. Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991), (2009).
Link.

Milton, J., Small, S. L. and Solodkin, A. Imaging motor imagery: methodological issues related to expertise. Methods (San Diego, Calif.) 45, 45-45, (2008).
Link.

Park, J.-H. and Shea, C. H. Effector independence. Journal of motor behavior 34, 34-34, (2002).
Link.

Polyakov, F., Stark, E., Drori, R., Abeles, M. and Flash, T. Parabolic movement primitives and cortical states: merging optimality with geometric invariance. Biological cybernetics 100, 100-100, (2009).
Link.

Riva, G., Gaggioli, A. and Mantovani, F. Are robots present? From motor simulation to "being there". Cyberpsychology & behavior : the impact of the Internet, multimedia and virtual reality on behavior and society 11, 11-11, (2008).
Link.

Serino, A., De Filippo, L., Casavecchia, C., Coccia, M., Shiffrar, M. and Ladavas, E. Lesions to the Motor System Affect Action Perception. Journal of cognitive neuroscience, (2009).
Link.

Skipper, J. I., Goldin-Meadow, S., Nusbaum, H. C. and Small, S. L. Gestures Orchestrate Brain Networks for Language Understanding. Current biology : CB, (2009).
Link.

Veyrac, A., Sacquet, J., Nguyen, V., Marien, M., Jourdan, F. and Didier, A. Novelty determines the effects of olfactory enrichment on memory and neurogenesis through noradrenergic mechanisms. Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology 34, 34-34, (2009).
Link.

Wu, S.-W., Delgado, M. R. and Maloney, L. T. Economic decision-making compared with an equivalent motor task. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, (2009).
Link.

Yates, C. A., Erban, R., Escudero, C., Couzin, I. D., Buhl, J., Kevrekidis, I. G., Maini, P. K. and Sumpter, D. J. T. Inherent noise can facilitate coherence in collective swarm motion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 106, 106-106, (2009).
Link.

Zanos, S. Neural correlates of high-frequency intracortical and epicortical field potentials. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience 29, 29-29, (2009).
Link.

Slow goin' and syncing madness

2009-04-10T10:12:00.005-04:00

Just a quick note (again) that things over here are changing, which always puts the strain on DNI. Right now my big issue is that all my email is being aggregated by GMail with another account, so I have to log in and out to get to my rss feeds and DNI mail. Plus, a little side project knocked out this weekend + the beginning of the week. Sooooo... sorry about the lag. Also, this Wednesday through next Wednesday will be a brief break, since I'll be preparing and presenting my prelim. Just giving fair warning.

I'm thinking of moving to Thunderbird 3 on a USB key for email, then Neuvasync for iPhone contact/calendar syncing. I'd have a TrueCrypt encrypted file to contain it all. The big problem is that TB, and all email clients for that matter, can only move messages to a single folder, which is picked up by GMail as a tag. In GMail you can have multiple tags, and I would like to be able to move seamlessly between TB and GMail. Poopy. Someone needs to make a GMail tagging add-on for TB. Anyhoo....

Also, if you have a LinkedIn account, there is a BCI group that you might find worth checking out.

House episode and SPF note

2009-04-04T03:35:00.003-04:00

Hulu says that the BCI episode of House will be up April 7. Pirate Bay says it's been up since a year before it aired. :D No, I'm not encouraging pirating, but ya see the problem here? Eh, I can't stay mad at Hulu. They just added all the episodes of Voltron. Activate interlocks! Dynatherms up! Megathrusters go!

I wanted to get SPF out today/yesterday but I have been swamped with work. I will probably do one final change to the rss feeds (I know, I know, sorry). I can't keep track of which tag I'm supposed to use for papers, so I will add a Papers feed and just put all of them under the Papers tag. No papers in any other feeds unless they are very important/interesting. In the meantime, you could just search the feeds for "Pubmed" or "journal" and be able to get the bulk of what I will be aggregating into SPF.

BCI on House

2009-04-01T15:19:00.004-04:00

If you love House, that great TV show starring Hugh Laurie as the cantankerous Dr. Gregory House, you should have noticed that they used a BCI in the most recent episode (season 5 episode 19). I was waiting for Hulu to have it up, but got enough emails and calls that I thought I would mention it today. Typical TV BCI, EEG-ish and mystical in operation, but the episode was pretty well done, with internal dialogue from the patient and no spelling of words as fast an able-bodied person could say them, but got a little cheesy. Still, this is an example of where an EEG system would make more sense than an implanted one. Cursor up for yes, cursor down for no.

Neuroscientists put out

2009-04-01T15:09:00.002-04:00

I'm going to let you in on a dirty little secret: neuroscientists are total players. Ha ha, right? Ignore that sample size isn't mentioned and check it:

(thepHtest, thanks Vania)

Honda: Our in-house research can't read

2009-04-01T14:49:00.004-04:00

Apparently, Honda has decided that they are the first to use a BCI (NIRS and EEG combo in this case) to control a robot (video here-and, oh, is it worth it). Not the first to use this technique, but the first to do it, ever. Okay, let's pretend that the Fetz 1969 experiments drove a 'device' instead of a robot (I'm not even sure how far back a device driven by surface electrode input might have been), but this is massively misleading. Sure this is just a stupid company statement, but Google "first robot controlled by a BCI" in two days and this crap will be the #1 result. *facepalm* I'm sure I can't really have an impact on such a large corporation's ridiculous press statement, so instead enjoy this video of ASIMO falling down stairs:

Thanks Katie for the heads up.

Two new Mendeley tools! Part 2

2009-03-31T13:05:00.004-04:00

The second, and arguably the most awesome tool new to Mendeley is.... Me!
(Tool? Get it? I'm so punny!)

I was waiting for this to be posted on the Mendeley blog before saying anything, but I will be joining the Mendeley team as a Community Liaison. Victor Henning and I came up with the idea when we met for coffee during his US east coast tour. We thought that designing a reference managing program/system should really be driven by the potential users, and that this was almost a full time job in itself. Like most problems, this one could be solved with minions. Or 'Mendions', if you prefer.

What does this mean to you, dear readers?

1) First, yes I will be mentioning cool Mendeley items. And yes, I am a paid consultant, so, depending on how you want to see it, I am a little biased. BUT...

2) I am working with Mendeley because I think the program has significant potential and the folks there have the vision, resources, and talent to do great things. Also, I can't believe that after leaving academia in 2001, I came back in 2005 to find almost no change in the tools for managing information. Seriously, EndNote looks the exact same as when I used it on my Power Mac 9500/120 running System 7. Sad.

3) My job is not to 'sell'. My job is to get feedback from users, librarians, and labs on how to make Mendeley work the way they do. There is a nice feedback and bug reporting system in place, so the Community Liaisons are more the 'big picture' folks and web presence crew. Yes, we'll be 'promoting' the program and web service but, like I said, I'm doing this because I do think it's a great program. So, if you have any insights you can provide, check the feedback system (it's very easy to use) and let me of any other the other CLs know! If you think I'm being unfair or too 'rah-rah', call me on it.

I'm really excited about this, and after dealing with all the papers and other literature I've amassed with my thesis project and DNI, I have a vested interest in helping make Mendeley awesome.

Two new Mendeley tools! Part 1

2009-03-30T15:43:00.003-04:00

Today: The awesome tool. Tomorrow: The total tool.

One of my suggestions to Mendeley has been put into action, and it totally rocks. It's a very simple idea: a bookmarklet that you can click when you are in PubMed or IEEEExplore that directly imports the publication into your paper library (they added a number of other sites, like Google Scholar, too). Well, it's a reality, and it totally rocks. Just one word of caution. There is still some wonkiness with DOI vs PMID queries that they are aware of, so just be aware of that. Once that is ironed out, I may switch Super Paper Friday over to be a shared Mendeley library. Here's the info, from the source:

It’s here! The Mendeley browser “bookmarklet” allows you to import documents from websites and academic databases into your Mendeley library with a single click. At the moment, the following sites are supported: ACM Portal, Amazon.com, arXiv.org, CiteSeer, IEEE Xplore, IngentaConnect, Google Book Search, Google Scholar, PubMed, NASA Astrophysics Data System, and ScienceDirect. We’ll be adding support for further sites continuously.
This is how it works: Say you’re on PubMed and you’ve just discovered an interesting paper. Now, all you need to do is click the “Import to Mendeley” bookmark in your browser - Mendeley does the rest: The paper is automatically added to your Mendeley Web library with metadata, abstract and (if available) the PDF. All of this happens in the background, so you don’t have to leave the PubMed page you’re on.

It also works on search results pages, so you can import multiple documents at the same time - a small pop-up allows you to choose which ones.

SPF resuming next week

2009-03-27T16:30:00.003-04:00

No sleep makes Brandon l0o0o0o0opy.

EEG consumer BCIs spanked by the Schwartzinator

2009-03-27T15:12:00.004-04:00

Forbes has a fun little story on the state of consumer BCIs that hits on the major consumer players, but also throws real BCIs researchers John Wolpaw and Andy Schwartz into the fray. Each echos the officially sanctioned position of their respective scalp electrode versus implanted microwire/fancier probe electrode camp.

I prefer to call this the Head-Computer Interface versus Brain-Computer Interface debate. I try to be even keeled on the subject. EEG is obviously a worthwhile endeavor because there's none of that messy surgery involved, and thus appeals to a very large audience (at least in the near term). Hey, if you get a signal that can be controlled by the user reliably and with an acceptable level of precision, you have something useful. BUT, EEG is a degraded, garbled, sloppy signal prone to nearly limitless interference sources. Anything that can bork an implanted BCI can bork an EEG-based system, but EEG throws the doors open to the world because you are essentially wearing an antenna (or several).

One major problem with EEG is the fallacy that somehow destroyed information can be recovered by some form of fancy filtering. This is simply not so. Think of the electrode as a point of convergence for all electromagnetic signals of a measurable intensity. Even after narrowing frequency bands and implementing funky probabilistic decoders, any squiggle can be the convergence of several squiggles of indeterminable sources. In other words, at a specific time, a signal of amplitude +5 can be two signals of +4 and +1, -2 and +7, or 5 signals of +1-4-2+3+7. And don't even start with harmonics.

The second problem is population size. I know we like to think that motor cortex responds to only movement. It makes life easier. What life? Life in La-La-Land. MI responds to visual stimuli, movement preparation, auditory stimuli, imagined movements, movement related words (heard, internally rehearsed or spoken), reward, attention, cutaneous and proprioceptive feedback, and a bunch of other factors I'm not even mentioning. Until the impact of these influences is understood and quantified, there will not be any BCI that translates the neural activity for "move my arm to point x,y,z". EEG will never have the fidelity to isolate the differences feedback has at the single neuron level, so the nature of the recorded signal will never allow the 'direct' mapping of neural activity to output. That is, the activity that once gave rise to movement can never be harnessed with an acceptable degree of control to recreate the movement. Yes, I am using the word never. Never. There, I said it again.

Like I said, this isn't an attack on EEG, just reality. Different uses for different technologies. I can drive a car on a road. That doesn't mean I can drive a road, or that a road has no use.

A story about a child named Notepad.exe

2009-03-26T19:20:00.004-04:00

Little Notepad.exe was always the quiet type of child; he never complained, talked out of turn, or crashed for that matter. But, he also never played with the other children, instead opting to spend recess inside, content with a single font and word wrap. The other children left Notepad.exe alone, for he was too plain and boring, and while flaunting their fancy ribbons and spell checkers they would giggle about which mail merge feature was better on standard 9x12 manila envelopes.

[insert more blathering literary setup here, maybe a plot, too]

The alien exploded from Notepad.exe's chest, a freakish monstrosity barely reminiscent of the shy creature it inhabited. As the creature's vessel collapsed to the ground with the sickening thud of dead flesh, the patrons at the motorbike and baby stroller emporium froze in horror. Before anyone could scream, the fearsome being, pulsing with raw energy of a million suns, spoke. "I am Notepad++, destroyer of worlds!"

Anyhow, I wanted to point out that Notepad++ is a great alternative to Notepad, and can be used to completely replace Windows's built-in, underpowered app. It has a ton of fancy tools, like code highlighting/collapsing if you are using it as an editor for any number of different languages, all sorts of text manipulation settings, tabbed and side-by-side document viewing, plugin support, and really too many features to even attempt to explain here, so do check it out. Oh and it's free.

Font trivia

2009-03-26T19:08:00.003-04:00

Filling out grant stuff, and I thought it would make sense to match the font in Word 2007 to the PDF I'm filling out. So I go to check for Helvetica in Word, and... it isn't there!?!? Hel-friggin-vetica? Okay, okay, maybe a bug or something. Let's see if I can download it... $300!?!?!

Needless to say, this mystery just sucked down about an hour of my time. I briefly explored the seedy underworld of typeface worship, following the twisted lies of stroke terminators and outfoxing the glyphs of despair. All I can say is that I can never look at Ariel again. *shudder*

I did find this ancient, sacred text, though.

Oh, and no, Office 2007 does not have Helvetica, no matter how many movies they make about the damn font. And yes, barring the usual alternatives, you have to pay out the nose for a 52 year old typeface.

Feeds updated (final update on these, I swear!)

2009-03-26T10:27:00.001-04:00

I'll update the post below as well, but I have the feeds now finalized, and I'm adding them to the sidebar after this is post is up.

For those of you wondering how I'm categorizing the news items with minimal pain, here's how...

I'm using Google Reader for my usual news reading. To keep from having to type tags, I'm using a free program called AutoHotKey, which is an AMAZING piece of software. Sounds simple, but basically it lets you create simple scripts that can do just about anything. Kinda like Windows meets the bash prompt, but easier to use, low on resources, and a $^$&-ton of really useful scripts out there. In fact, many of the little utility programs that you use right now may have an AHK script equivalent, especially if you got them from Donation Coder. AHK scripts can be compiled into executables, or you can let them run in the background, or you can drop files onto them. Want a script that randomizes your desktop icon placement every 15 seconds? 30 seconds of coding (if you don't know what you're doing).

In this case, I have a simple AHK script that changes Alt+F1 into the "t" keystroke (opens the 'tag' section in GReader), Alt+F2 into "Neuroscience and Bioengineering, ", etc. So, I see something I like, I drop my thumb on the Alt, hit F1, consider the categories it falls into and hit those F-keys, and then Return. My hands don't have to move, except in a few cases (which is why I used Alt+F1 for t, when I could just hit t).

If anything is wonky, please please please let me know.

The feeeeeddddssssss must be fed!

2009-03-25T15:00:00.005-04:00

He we go...

Starting today, the RSS feed structure will follow the structure from this previous post. Old feed items are not being updated, so for everything before today, starred = BCI, shared = technology. Side bar links updated, too.

Categories:

Starred

Shared

Neuroscience and Bioengineering

Interface and HCI

Technology

Science Policy and Perspectives

Education

Organization and Efficiency

Fun and Misc

Video and Audio