This week the Luxembourg team has hosted our Polish partner, Prof. Aleksandra Kawala-Sterniuk from Opole University of Technology. We did good progress on the project and discussed lots of ideas to be developed in the upcoming months.
All researchers funded by Chist-ERA were brought together in Bratislava! Including BANANA project team members.
The event was fantastic and we could share our experiences with other BCI-call projects under under Chist-ERA IV “Advanced Brain-Computer Interfaces for Novel Interactions (BCI)“:
GENESIS, BISTSCOPE, ReHaB and BANANA!
We have presented poster, presentation and me (Aleksandra Kawala-Sterniuk) also co-chaired (with Hakim Si-Mohammed) session. regarding our call!
From January 2023, the Banana team from Opole will be enriched with a new member – Prof. Dariusz Mikolajewski.
Dariusz is the author of over 240 publications and has managed many scientific projects. He has extensive experience in the analysis of biomedical data. He is currently completing his second PhD in Psychiatry.
Temporal synchronization of behavioral and physiological signals collected through different devices (and sometimes through different computers) is a longstanding challenge in HCI, neuroscience, psychology, and related areas. Previous research has proposed to synchronize sensory signals using (1) dedicated hardware; (2) dedicated software; or (3) alignment algorithms. All these approaches are either vendor-locked, non-generalizable, or difficult to adopt in practice.
We propose a simple but highly efficient alternative: instrument the stimulus presentation software by injecting supervisory event-related timestamps, followed by a post-processing step over the recorded log files. Armed with this information, we introduce Gustav, our approach to orchestrate the recording of sensory signals across devices and computers. Gustav ensures that all signals coincide exactly with the duration of each experiment condition, with millisecond precision.
Gustav injects a supervisory timing signal that helps orchestrating the experiment conditions across devices and computers, from simple (a) to complex (c) setups.
Gustav is publicly available as open source software: https://gitlab.uni.lu/coin/gustav/
Reference
Kayhan Latifzadeh, Luis A. Leiva. Gustav: Cross-device Cross-computer Synchronization of Sensory Signals. In Adjunct Proc. UIST, 2022. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3526114.3558723
Happy that Mohammad Amin Fahami (https://t.co/RyeLmugPX8) has joined us at @init in Spain to work on the @banana_bci project. We expect to address interesting challenges in the field of #BCI and get nice contributions with a good joint effort.
BSPL Lab from the Opole University of Technology, which is the part of the BANANA project had two interesting visits in July!
On 5th July visited us for a short visit Prof. Dean J. Krusienski from the Virginia Common University, Richmond VA. He is an authority in BCIs! He was also an author of recommendation letter for our project and is keeping his fingers crossed for us. We are also looking forward to future collaboration with prof. Krusienski!
Another visit took place on 8th July, Prof. Carla Stecco for Padua University in Italy popped in for a short visit to see our equipment to talk about potential collaboration.
One of the BANANA project partners obtained their new fNIRS (functional near infra-red spectroscopy) device from the Cortivision company (https://www.cortivision.com). Initial tests in progress.
BANANA participated in the CHIST-ERA project Seminar that was held on Monday to Wednesday this week. It was a nice opportunity to learn about other projects corresponding to previous CHIST-ERA calls and, particularly, the projects that, like BANANA, are participating in the BCI topic. It was also a good opportunity to do some networking, even online. Looking forward to working for advances in this promising HCI area! Videos of some of the sessions can be found on CHIST-ERA YouTube channel.
We are happy to announce that project BANANA has officially started today. We look forward to advancing basic and applied research on Brain-Computer Interfaces.
You can follow this blog to keep an eye on our progress and see how the project evolves. Stay tuned!