Symbiotic 2015 - 4th international workshop on symbiotic interaction

October 15, 2015 by Eva Ferrari

The 4th International Workshop on Symbiotic Interaction was held in Berlin on the 7th and 8th of October 2015, chaired by Prof. Benjamin Blankertz (Technische Universität Berlin) and Prof. Giulio Jacucci (University of Helsinki), both partners in the MindSee project.

Since 2012, Symbiotic has been focusing on the symbiotic relationships between humans and computers as well as novel advancements therein. The idea of symbiotic systems put forward in this year's workshop capitalises on the computers’ ability to implicitly (even subliminally) detect the users goals and psycho-physiological states and thereby enhancing human-computer interaction (HCI) without subducting control from the human.

The workshop was opened with a tutorial of the software MIDAS, to provide a hands-on session in which participants were introduced to online analysis of psychophysiological signals. It continued with a Keynote speech by Fabio Babiloni on "Brain computer interfaces for the industrial application of cognitive neuroscience" and concluded with a rich poster session. On the second day, Professor Peter Desain opened the workshop with a Keynote speech titled "Broad Band Evoked Potentials, the advantage of a model-driven BCI" and continued with a number of talks from researchers of variuos institutions, closed by a panel discussion.

In line with the previous thrree events, the workshop aimed at promoting the exchange of scientific experiences in designing symbiotic systems, studying the way in which they affect human behaviour and defining the principles for a functional interdependence of humans and machines, with a special focus on physiological computing approaches, e.g. using brain-computer interface (BCI) technology.

All papers and posters accepted and showcased during the workshop (peer-reviewed) will be available in a proceeding published by Springer in Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

Given the growing relevance and interest gathered, it has been announced that the Symbiotic Workshop series will continue in 2016! See you all in Padova, Italy on September 29-30!

A Visual History of Human Knowledge

September 11, 2015 by Eva Ferrari

In this TED talk, infographics expert Manuel Lima explores the history of information visualisation. Since the beginning of times humans had the urge to rank, create an order and visualise information. Originally people used the metaphor of a tree to map family relationships, animal species or the realms of human knowledge. However knowledge cannot always be represented in such way: it is too complex, intricate and interdependent.

The metaphor that better represents knowledge is not a tree but a matrix, a network or a web. Hierarchy can show you the internal structure of an organisation, while a network is able to show the relationships and the connections between its members. Network visualisation is becoming a syntax of a new language and the same matrix model, such as the radial converge, can be use to represent the most disparate things: from DNA to Facebook networks.

Matrices and network seems to be able to embody the notion of decentralisation, non linearity, interconnectedness, interdependence and multiplicity. Manuel Lima believes that this way of thinking will help us solving a number o problems: from decoding the brain to understanding the universe.

Source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQZKs75RMqM&feature=em-uploademail

MindSee partners at the 37th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society

August 31, 2015 by Eva Ferrari

The 37th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS) took place on August 25-29, 2015 in Milan, Italy. The conference covers many topics, from Biomedical Signal Processing to Neural and Rehabilitation Engineering, Biomechanics, from Robotics to Biosensors and Bio-Micro/Nano Technologies. The conference remarks the central role of BME in the improvement and innovation of health care (with a direct impact on the quality of life) but also focuses on how to reach and maintain a “wellness” through proper and advanced technologies, devices and protocols.

Three papers were accepted and presented at the conference, resulting from work conducted by MindSee partners at Technische Universität Berlin.

Papers:

The full program and papers are available here http://emb.citengine.com/event/embc-2015/details.

38th International ACM SIGIR Conference

August 16, 2015 by Eva Ferrari

MindSee related work was presented this August (9th - 13th) at the 38th International ACM SIGIR Conference in Santiago, Chile. SIGIR 2015 is a perfect theatre for Mindsee as it is a major international forum for the presentation of new research results and for the demonstration of new systems and techniques in Information Retrieval.

Mindsee partners at Aalto University presented their work at the main conference on Tuesday the 11th (SciNet: Interactive intent modeling for information discovery) as well as the at the conference's workshop (NeuroIR), focusing on Neuro-Physiological Methods in Information Retrieval Research. A paper (Predicting relevance of text from neuro-physiology ) as well as a demo session were delivered.

When We Read, We Recognize Words as Pictures and Hear Them Spoken Aloud

July 23, 2015 by Eva Ferrari

As your eyes scan these words, your brain seems to derive their meaning instantaneously. How are we able to recognize and interpret marks on a page so rapidly? A small new study confirms that a specialized brain area recognizes printed words as pictures rather than by their meaning.

Researchers led by neuroscientist Maximilian Riesenhuber of Georgetown University Medical Center scanned the brains of 12 subjects with functional MRI. They focused on a tiny area of the brain known to be involved in recognizing words, the visual word form area (VWFA), found on the surface of the brain, behind the left ear. The VWFA's right hemisphere analogue is the fusiform face area, which allows us to recognize faces. In young children and people who are illiterate, the VWFA region and the fusiform face area both respond to faces. As people learn to read, the VWFA region is co-opted for word recognition.

6th MindSee Consortium meeting & Exploitation/Innovation session

June 12, 2015 by Eva Ferrari

The next consortium meeting will see all partners from the MindSee project gathering in the town of Helsinki for a 2 day meeting on June 15th and 16th, 2015. Pia Erkinheimo from Digile, will join the Exploitation and Innovation session that the consortium has organised for day 2, as an external expert and moderator to help the MindSee project with appropriate planning.

See you all in Helsinki!

The past, present and future of consumer BCI

June 12, 2015 by Eva Ferrari

A recent article by I. Genuth (The Institution of Engineering and Technology ) reports quite an interesting summary of how electroencephalography (EEG) has developed through the years, and of how it is now advancing rapidly into the consumer market. There seems to be an agreement among experts that in the near future the industry will not only grow in size, but will also see a huge expansion in the capabilities and uses of the technology.

"Since its development in the first half of the 20th century, EEG greatly contributed to the advancement of neuroscience as well as to everyday neurological practice. It is used to: diagnose epilepsy for seizure prediction; develop biomarkers for a spectrum of brain disorders including Alzheimer's and depression; and diagnose sleep disorders, coma and even brain death. Now this unique and powerful technology is on its way to the consumer market.

There are several manufacturers of consumer EEG, and they have different approaches in bringing brain-computer interfaces to the general public and a different vision for the use of the technology.

101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication - the Changing Research Workflow

June 11, 2015 by Eva Ferrari

Jeroe Bosnam and Bianca Kramer from Utrecht University Library have recently presented a poster with the intention to address the questions of what drives innovation in scholarly communication and how these innovations change research workflows and may contribute to more open, efficient and good science.

As they explain, changes in this landscape are driven by technology, policies, and culture, but in the end only take place because researchers and other stakeholders decide to adapt their workflows or recommend changes to others. As shown in the poster, the developing landscape is for an important part expressed through changing tool usage. New tools are constantly being developed by researchers themselves, small start-ups or big players, as reflected in the images above.

Attention decay in science

May 29, 2015 by Eva Ferrari

A recent article (March 2015) entitled 'Attention decay in science' concludes that "the exponential growth in the number of scientific papers makes it increasingly difficult for researchers to keep track of all the publications relevant to their work".

"Consequently," the say, "the attention that can be devoted to individual papers, measured by their citation counts, is bound to decay rapidly". The risk here, in a time where the number of publications is booming, is to overlook important data and theories due to the much larger pool of papers among which attention has to be distributed and the limited capacity of scholars to keep track of it.

Apparently, the citation rate of papers increase just after publication to decrease rapidly after a few years. The authors specify that "the decay is also becoming faster over the years, signaling that nowadays papers are forgotten more quickly. However, when time is counted in terms of the number of published papers, the rate of decay of citations is fairly independent of the period considered. This indicates that the attention of scholars depends on the number of published items, and not on real time".

influencing people's moral choices by tracking their gaze →

April 13, 2015 by Eva Ferrari

We report here an extract from an article by the BPS (British Psychological Society) discussing some interesting findings from a recent study (by Pärnamets et al., 2015) which showed that the process of arriving at a moral decision is not only reflected in a participant’s eye gaze but can also be determined by it.

Where we look betrays what we're thinking. For instance, given a choice between two snacks, people spend longer looking at the alternative that they ultimately choose. A new study digs deeper into this process and asks: is gaze direction also related to moral choices, and does it actually influence those choices?

IUI 2015 - INTELLIGENT USER INTERFACES CONFERENCE

April 01, 2015 by Eva Ferrari

Today April 1st 2015, partners in the MindSee project from the University of Helsinki are in Atlanta at iUI 2015 presenting a paper titled "Exploring Peripheral Physiology as a Predictor of Perceived Relevance in Information Retrieval". iUI 2015 is the 20th annual meeting of the intelligent interfaces community and serves as a premier international forum for reporting outstanding research and development on intelligent user interfaces. iUI is where the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community meets the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community.

Dont miss Oswald Barral's presentation today at 10am. Full program available here .

Featured Talks - MindSee's affiliates visiting HIT in Padova

April 01, 2015 by Eva Ferrari

David Kirsh, Professor and past chair of the Department of Cognitive Science at UCSD and Benjamin Blankertz, Professor at TU Berlin with a chair in Neurotechnology were recently invited by The Human Inspired Technology Lab in Padova to present their work as part of HiT's Featured Talks.

Both Professors are affiliated with the MindSee project: Professor Kirsh is member of the Advisory Board, while Prosessor Blankerts is one of the partners in the Consortium. His talk gave an overview of the current state of BCI technology beyond medical applications and outline a path to explore and foster this direction of research toward realistic applicability. Blankertz is also this year's organiser of the International Workshop on Symbiotic Interaction. Having participated to last year's workshop as a key note speaker, Prof. Kirsh explored the basic principles of symbiotic using examples from evolution, contextual robotics, and devices that support disintermediation and distributed and augmented cognition.

Their visit to Padova was one of the many examples of collaboration that the project seeks in order to disseminate results and strengthen collaboration between universities in Europe as much as overseas.