Workshops of the seventh international brain-computer interface meeting: not getting lost in translation

ABSTRACT

The Seventh International Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) Meeting was held May 21-25th, 2018 at the Asilomar Conference Grounds, Pacific Grove, California, United States. The interactive nature of this conference was embodied by 25 workshops covering topics in BCI (also called brain-machine interface) research. Workshops covered foundational topics such as hardware development and signal analysis algorithms, new and imaginative topics such as BCI for virtual reality and multi-brain BCIs, and translational topics such as clinical applications and ethical assumptions of BCI development. BCI research is expanding in the diversity of applications and populations for whom those applications are being developed. BCI applications are moving toward clinical readiness as researchers struggle with the practical considerations to make sure that BCI translational efforts will be successful. This paper summarizes each workshop, providing an overview of the topic of discussion, references for additional information, and identifying future issues for research and development that resulted from the interactions and discussion at the workshop.

KEYWORDS:

• Brain-computer interface
• brain-machine interface
• neuroprosthetics
• conference

Acknowledgments

Overall Acknowledgements

The authors thank the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) and the National Institute Of Neurological Disorders And Stroke (NINDS) in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) of the United States and the National Science Foundation (NSF) for travel support assisting student attendance at the BCI Meeting. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of NIDCD, NINDS, NIH, NSF, or any other funding agency that may have supported work presented at the BCI Meeting or in the individual workshops.

The workshop organizers thank the many presenters for their excellent work as well as the workshop attendees for the stimulating discussion. They also thank the various funding sources that supported the research of presenters and attendees. The workshop organizers also thank the members of the Program Committee for the Seventh International Brain-Computer Interface Meeting: Nick Ramsey, Brendan Z. Allison, Chuck Anderson, Jennifer Collinger, Shangkai Gao, Christoph Guger, Jane Huggins, Andrea Kübler, Donatella Mattia, José del R. Millán, Marc Slutzky, and Jonathan Wolpaw.

Individual Workshop Acknowledgements

The workshop BCIs for Assessment of Locked-in and Patients with Disorders of Consciousness (DOC) was supported by the H2020 project ComaWare.

The workshop BCIs for Stroke Rehabilitation was supported by the H2020 project recoveriX.

The workshop ECoG for Control and Mapping was supported by the Van Wagenen Foundation and The EC project RapidMaps.

The workshop Examining the Ethical Assumptions About Neural Engineering and BCI Development would like to thank all of the presenters for their invaluable contributions. I would also like to thank the CNT Neuroethics Thrust for their continual support and constructive feedback on the dialogue tool, such as Sara Goering, Eran Klein, Tim Brown, Michelle Pham, Marion Boulicault, Erika Versalovic, Sierra Simmerman and Hannah Martens. Thanks to Laura Specker Sullivan, Marion Boulicault, and Joseph Stramondo for their collaboration with prior iterations of the dialogue tool and facilitating past ethics roundtables.

The workshop Eye Tracking, Vision, and BCI was supported by the National Institutes of Health under grant #2R01DC009834-06A1 and the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research under grant #90RE5017.

The workshop Natural Language Processing & BCI would like to acknowledge support from NIDCD grant #R01DC00983410.

The workshop Standards for Neurotechnologies and Brain-Machine Interfacing would like to thank all the participants of the workshop. This work was supported by the IEEE Brain Initiative and the IEEE Standards Association Industry Connections Program

The workshop Tools for Establishing Neuroadaptive Technology Through Passive BCIs was supported by the Society for Neuroadaptive Technology. (www.neuroadaptive.org)

The workshop Turning negative into positives! Exploiting negative results in Brain-Machine Interface research was supported by the French National Research Agency with the REBEL project (grant ANR-15-CE23-0013-01), the European Research Council with the Brain-Conquest project (grant ERC-2016-STG-714567), the Inria Project Lab BCI-LIFT as well as by the EPFL/Inria International Lab. The organizers would also like to thank all the workshop participants for the stimulating and inspiring discussions.

The workshop Unsupervised Learning for BCI thankfully acknowledges the support by BrainLinks-BrainTools Cluster of Excellenc (grant EXC 1086) and by the bwHPC initiative (grant INST 39/963-1 FUGG).

The workshop Clinical Applications of Brain-Computer Interfaces in Neurorehabilitation was supported by NIH grant R01NS094748.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Research Council [ERC-2016-STG-714567];National Institutes of Health [2R01DC009834];National Institutes of Health [R01NS094748];National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders [R01DC00983410];IEEE Brain Initiative;IEEE Standards Association Industry Connections Program;Society for Neuroadaptive Technology;French National Research Agency [ANR-15-CE23-0013-01];Inria Project Lab [BCI-LIFT];EPFL/Inria International Lab;BrainLinks-BrainTools Cluster of Excellence [EXC 1086];Baden-Württemberg High Performance Computing Initiative [INST 39/963-1 FUGG];European Commission Project [RapidMaps];Van Wagenen Foundation;H2020 [ComaWare];H2020 [recoveriX].