Brain Machine Interfaces: Science, Technology, and Application

Time: Wednesdays 1:30 PM - 4:30 PM
Location: Jordan Hall, Room 102
Professors: E.J. Chichilnisky, Brian Wandell

Lecturers: Daniel Palanker, Nikos Logothetis, John Oghalai, Stephen Baccus, Paul Nuyujukian, Dan Yoshor, Nick Melosh 

Teaching Assistants: Cordelia Erickson-Davis, Karthik Ganesan

Motivation: This course explores the current state of brain-machine interfaces: technologies that directly stimulate and/or record neural activity.  Such interfaces are being used to treat nervous system disorders, including hearing, seeing, and motor dysfunction. We expect that the range of applications will expand over the next decade to other neurological conditions and to augmentation of function.

Content: The material we cover aims to explain some of the existing technology and to clarify its limitations and promise. The course organization is designed to develop new ideas and promote new collaborations for extending the reach of these technologies. The class will feature lecturers with expertise in brain-machine interfaces of various sorts or related technologies and methods, as well as directed readings and discussion about new work in the field.

Organization: All students will present a paper during a class meeting. Students enrolled for 2-3 units will additionally do a course project involving research, reading, writing, or computation on a topic of their choice, and will present this project at the end of the class. Students with diverse backgrounds are welcome, some knowledge of neuroscience and/or electrical engineering and signal processing is expected.

Grading: 1 unit:  Attend class, discuss, lead a discussion of a paper
                2-3 units: Complete a course paper/project

Presentation: Projects will be briefly presented during the last class.  Each presenter should prepare at most 2 slides, anticipating a 5 minute presentation + Q&A.  The first slide should provide motivation and background, the second should describe one or more main points learned in the project.  Grading of the presentation will be primarily based on clarity: how clearly and effectively you explain the subject matter to the diverse group in the class. A project can be one of the following:

1) review of some papers covering areas of BMI that we didn't cover in the course

2) research proposal to develop technology/methods to improve on a BMI we covered

3) computation/simulation that would give insight into how to design/improve BMIs.

 

Schedule:

3/30 Relating neural activity and perception: Lessons from color  (Wandell)

4/06 Mechanisms of electrical stimulation, application to retinal prosthetics (Palanker)  (Nandita, Scott)

4/13 Novel methods for neural interface (Melosh) (Richard)

4/20 Intracortical prostheses for communication (Nuyujukian) (Gary)

4/27 Ultrasonic neurostimulation (Baccus) (Elizabeth)

5/04 Cochlear implants (Oghalai) (Anjali)

5/11 Towards an advanced retinal prosthesis (Chichilnisky) (Allan)

5/18 Connectivity revealed by electrophysiology, electrical stimulation, and fMRI (Logothetis)  (Sabrina, Danny)

5/25 V1 implants (Yoshor) (Eric)

6/01 Course project presentations

 

 

 

Course Summary:

Date Details Due