Achievement

Brain-computer interfacing (BCI) is one of the major topics of our IGERT project.. A collaboration between neurophysiologists (Andrew Schwartz and Aaron Batista) and computational faculty (Byron Yu and Rob Kass) provides interdisciplinary research experiences for several IGERT students, leading to two interesting recent developments. The first is an improved method of BCI cursor control implemented by ECE student Matt Golub. Using conventional decoding techniques, monkeys can accurately control the direction of cursor movement but have poor control of speed, making it difficult to stop on a target. Golub's approach uses the rate of directional change to dampen the decoded speed signal. Using this modified decoder, his monkeys learned to make clean stops on targets and hold the cursor steady for significantly longer periods. A manuscript describing this result is in preparation.