Seminar: Brain-Computer Interaction

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) have been a widely researched topic for the last 20 years. BCIs make use of brain activity to create controls for computers or machines in general. The most common approach to establish such a connection between computer and brain is to measure the electrical activity of the brain at the scalp surface, via Electroencephalography (EEG). Those EEG devices are non-invasive, comparably cheap and can nowadays even be used with dry electrode caps, which makes them easy to setup. Within this seminar you will learn about different techniques and types of BCIs and develop your own Brain-Computer Interface with a dry electrode EEG-headset in a group project.

The seminar consists of 3 stages:

  1. In the first stage you will do a basic literature research on a topic/task that we provide to you. Each of those tasks covers a different topic in Brain-Computer Interaction. Those topics will be presented in the Kickoff meeting, including a short introductory lecture on different BCI techniques, providing the necessary background. After the presentation you can indicate your interest on one of those topics and we will try to assign you to a group according to your interest. Afterwards you will receive basic literature regarding this topic and perform a literature research on the state-of-the-art in this field. 
  2. In a second step you will create a concept and implementation plan to solve the given task. This implementation plan should be based on state-of-the-art methods that you researched on in the first step and will be presented to the seminar participants and tutors in a 20-minute presentation. The talk should introduce the task/problem you were working on, include the most relevant studies in this field, what impact those studies and their results have on your work and finally your implementation plan that you concluded on. The implementation plan will be discussed in the group and if accepted you can proceed to the implementation.
  3. In the third stage you will implement the BCI-application with your group in the DFKI labs. We will provide you the headsets and other required hardware. In order to give you all an introduction to the headset that you will use (https://www.unicorn-bi.com/ ) there will be a tutorial on the software architecture and general information on how to get started with the headset. Afterwards you will continue with the implementation and at the end of the seminar each group will give a short demonstration of the implemented prototype.

At the end of the seminar you will write down your results in the format of a typical research paper including Introduction, Related Work, Methods and Results section. We will provide you a template for that. This summary should be 6-8 pages long.

General Information

  • Time: Tuesday, 10:00 - 11:30
  • Location: At DFKI, rooms TBA
  • Credit Points: 7
  • Language: English
  • Places: 10
  • If you're interested in the seminar and didn't manage to get a spot, please email maurice.rekrut@dfki.de expressing your interest, and if after the first week there's an available spot, we'll contact you to let you know.

Important dates

  • Kickoff:
    • 15.11.2023, 12:30 - 14:00
    • room Turing 2 at DFKI
    • Content: Short introduction on BCIs in general, the seminar, organizational issues and topics for you to work on.
  • Lecture Basics of EEG/BCI Signal Processing:
    • 28.11.2023, 10:00 - 11:30
    • room Turing 2 at DFKI
    • Content: We will present the basics of EEG/BCI signal processing that you will need for the implementation of your project.
  • Concept presentation:
    • 05.12.2023, 10:00 - 11:30
    • room Turing 2 at DFKI 
    • Content: You will present to us your implementation plan of your project in a 15-20 min presenation including a short background on the methods and a 15 min discussion.
  • LSF Registration
    • 06.12.2023 latest!
    • https://www.lsf.uni-saarland.de/
    • Content: If you want to receive a grade for the seminar, be sure to have registered until this date 06.12.2023 in LSF, otherwise you will not receive a grade for the seminar!
  • Final demonstration: end of February, date TBA

Grading

  • 10% for the RW- Implementation-Presentation
  • 50% for the prototype development
  • 40% for the summary and the final demonstration of the prototype

Contact

  • Maurice Rekrut (Maurice.Rekrut@dfki.de)
  • Tobias Jungbluth (Tobias.Jungbluth@dfki.de)
  • Johannes Ihl (Johannes.Ihl@dfki.de)