“The easiest path is not always the best” Lobsang Rampa, The Third Eye Ever since I read when I was a teenager Lobsang Rampa’s The Third Eye, I have been fascinated with astral traveling, or as modern science calls it, Out-of-Body Experiences (OBE). In the last years, OBE have been studied from a neuro-scientific point […]
Broadly speaking, when we talk about analysing EEG signals, we are talking about how to use those time-varying signals to classify clinical conditions, behavioural events or predict responses (is the person awake or not? is this person going to develop Parkinson?). As such, learning temporal dependencies in those time series and predicting or classifying events […]
Since its first edition in 1994 Sonar Festival is definitely one of the electronic music festivals you cannot miss. For its sixth consecutive year in Barcelona, Sonar+D organized its famous hackathon along with the Music Technology Group of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Sonar Music Hack Day (MHD) is a hacking session in which participants will […]
Recently in Starlab we conducted some recordings out of the lab. We equipped some volunteers with a bunch of EEG, ECG and GSR sensors along with a GoPro cam so we could capture electro-physiological signals as well as volunteers’ point of view during the whole experiment. The idea was to record people while visiting an […]
Brain-Computer Interaction (BCI) based technology is thriving and has the potential of spreading into society by addressing the needs of various user groups under different application scenarios. Wolpaw and Wolpaw (2012) identified the five principal BCI scenarios or application types that may have evolved so far, namely, replace, restore, improve, supplement and enhance. Communication is […]
In the past years machine learning has been used to address many different problems in neuroscience. When we talk about classification, several algorithms have been proposed for specific tasks. For instance, in Starlab we have used discriminative learning algorithms for EEG/ECG classification (e.g. neurodegenerative diseases) or time-series classification. This type of algorithms model the dependence […]
As I have explained in a previous post, we loose about 100 000 neurons per day. But this is not something to be really worried about, since the thing that really matters is the quality of their connections, not their number. As we know, the brain is plastic so we can create new connections and […]
In this post I would like to introduce the concept of BrainPolyphony, a CRG Awards-founded project in which Centre de Regulació Genòmica (CRG), Universitat de Barcelona, Mobilitylab, ASDI and Starlab will explore new ways of communication for patients suffering from severe speech disabilities. Patients with neurodegenerative diseases, such as cerebral palsy, often experience important communication problems. […]
– Neuro… what? What on earth is neuroinformatics… you mean, bioinformatics? Indeed neuroinformatics takes inspiration from bioinformatics, which refers to the combination of omics data (genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic…) and its understanding with machine learning tools (well, and other computer science disciplines). Bioinformatics has brought enormous advances for instance in cancer research, which was itself one […]
During the last 3 weeks, I had the chance to travel to 3 amazing cities: Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan. The main objective was to attend the “1st International Brain Stimulation Conference” in Singapore and then the “2015 International Workshop on Clinical Brain Neural-Machine Interface Systems”. As there were some days between both conferences, I stopped […]