This is funding to support student travel to and participation in the 4th International Brain-Computer Interface (IBCI) Meeting, which will be held May 31-June 4, 2010, in Asilomar, California. Brain-computer interface research explores avenues of controlling devices directly from brain signals, and the IBCI Meetings constitute the flagship conference for the field. Effective BCI research requires highly interdisciplinary interactions involving neuroscience, psychology, engineering, mathematics, computer science, and clinical rehabilitation. Because no standard venue brings these groups together, the IBCI meeting serves a critical catalyst for technology dissemination, new collaborations, and educational opportunities for students. NSF funding will enable approximately 40 students, including undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, to attend and participate in the conference. All of the NSF funding will be used for student travel, registration, and student-only event costs. The organizers' main objective will be to give students a significant educational and professional experience in the BCI field, and to provide opportunities for them to gain depth in their specific interest areas. The conference will begin with a specialized student colloquium on the afternoon before the full conference starts, which will provide lectures from prominent experts in the BCI field. This will give the students a solid foundation for understanding the rest of the conference. There will also be a student poster session and prizes for the best student research projects, and students will have access to research leaders for informal question-and-answer sessions at the end of each day. The students will participate fully in the main conference as well, mentored by their advisors and other senior conference participants. This year's conference will have an increased focus on student participation, ensuring a good experience for the students as well as encouraging young researchers to explore the BCI field for their research. Exposure to prominent researchers in the BCI field will allow students to receive invaluable feedback on their work, and to make connections that may result in new research directions.
Broader Impacts: Student participation in the three previous IBCI meetings has been very fruitful; a large number of those who attended have now graduated and are prominent researchers in the BCI field. The Journal of Neural Engineering has agreed to publish the Proceedings of this meeting as a series of peer reviewed papers in a special issue, which will further disseminate the results of the meeting. The organizers are actively working to recruit students from traditionally underrepresented groups to attend the conference. Supporting student participation in the IBCI conference will educate, motivate, and inspire the future leaders in brain-computer interface research while promoting diversity which will strengthen the BCI research community.
, which is the flagship conference of the field. The conference included many activities for the students: SPECIAL STUDENT EVENTS Students were encouraged to participate in all aspects of the conference. The laboratory research reports of the first day exposed them to the breadth and variety of BCI research going on around the world. The informal workshops familiarized them with the issues now being addressed on the cutting edge of the research and with the different viewpoints on those issues. Students also assisted in workshop planning; participated in the workshop discussions; and ssisted in the preparation of summary reports. Student Colloquium In preparation for the main meeting, a special colloquium was held for students on the afternoon of May 31 with the purpose of presenting a big picture, as well as filling in gaps in their understanding before they moved into specialized sessions on various aspects of the field. The goal was for students to have a general familiarity with all aspects of BCI research when the conference began. Because BCI research requires collaboration of workers in many different disciplines, students came with a variety of backgrounds and educational preparation and thus had only a partial understanding of the field. The tutorial consisted of four one-hour lectures including an introductory lecture by Dr. Jon Wolpaw who presented a broad overview. The remaining lectures, by established scientists participating in the conference,focused on the essential components of BCI: hardware and software, signal processing, applications, and user groups. The lecturers were Charles Anderson, Melody Moore Jackson, and Dean Krusienski, all NSF award recipients. Talk Backs On Monday and Wednesday afternoons at 5:00, students attended special "talk back" sessions where established researchers were available to answer questions on the events of the day or the preceding days and led discussions. Other attendees participated, but the focus was on helping students to understand and put in context what has been presented. Poster Presentations and Competition: The Jacque Vidal Poster Prize Students and post-doctoral fellows presented posters on their research which were judged by a panel of senior BCI researchers on the basis of innovation and scientific or technical merit. Three awards of $200 each were given in honor of Jacque J. Vidal, a pioneer in the field of BCI research for the best student posters. Fifth BCI Data Competition Since 2002, this competition has challenged the signal processing community to develop and demonstrate effective new methods through use of unlabeled data to improve BCI outcome. We created a web-site where participants downloaded and submitted problem sets and competed head to head with other contestants in a series of challenging unlabeled-data, supervised-learning problems. g-tec Annual BCI-Research Award Sponsored by the g-tec medical engineering company, this prize of $3,000 was awarded for outstanding and innovative research done in the field of Brain-Computer Interface. Competitors submitted a 2-page description of their work. Projects were scored by the BCI2000 group at the Wadsworth Center, and the award was presented at the conference. Short Talks Students were encouraged to organize their own breakfast meeting on Thursday, where 5-minute talks were given on work in the labs where they are studying. PARTICIPATION BY TRADITIONALLY UNDERREPRESENTED GROUPS Announcements of the meeting and invitations to submit abstracts have were sent out widely to attract women and underrepresented minority participants, including to traditionally black colleges and to female graduate students and postdocs listed in Rice University’s ADVANCE Program’s National Database of Female Ph.D. Students and Postdocs in science, engineering, and psychology fields. Announcements included the information that a limited amount of funding was available to support the attendance of students and postdocs at the conference and inviting applications for the funds.
