Neural Engineering

BRL attends Deep Brain Stimulation Think Tank

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uf_thinktankLast week, BRL researchers Jeffrey Herron, Maggie Thompson, Brady Houston, and Prof. Howard Chizeck attended the third annual DBS Think Tank in Orlando, Florida. Our collaborator Dr. Andrew Ko from the UW Medical Center also joined us in this trip to discuss cutting edge research into improving DBS therapy. Howard Chizeck presented our ongoing work to build engineering tools to enable research into  closed-loop and volitional control of DBS therapy. We aim to use these tools collaboratively to accelerate development of advanced DBS systems across multiple institutions. Thank you to the organizers for putting together such a great event!

Upcoming Publications and Conferences

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Members of the BRL will be presenting a number of papers at upcoming conferences this spring. The final papers will be posted to this website after each of the respective conferences.

 

WeRobot 2015 http://www.werobot2015.org/, the fourth annual conference on Robotics, Law and policy, will be held in Seattle on April 10-11, 2015. This innovative conference includes formal (and informal) discussions of papers by experts from government, NGO’s, corporations and legal experts, as well as academics. Two of the papers to be addressed in this conference involve our lab:

I Did It My Way: On Law And Operator Signatures for Teleoperated Robots by Tamara Bonaci, Aaron Alva, Jeffrey Herron, Ryan Calo, Howard Jay Chizeck

Personal Responsibility in the Age of User-Controlled Neuroprosthetics by Patrick Moore, Timothy Brown, Jeffrey Herron, Margaret Thompson, Tamara Bonaci, Sara Goering, and Howard Chizeck.

 

The 2015 Cyberphysical Systems Week Conference  http://www.cpsweek.org/2015/  will be held in Seattle from April 14-16, 2014. This international conference (since 2008) now encompasses four ACM and IEEE conferences. Our lab’s contribution is:

Experimental Analysis of Denial-of-Service Attacks on Teleoperated Robotic Systems by Tamara Bonaci, Junjie Yan, Jeffrey Herron, Tadayoshi Kohno, Howard Jay Chizeck

 

The 2015 7th International IEEE/EMBS Conference on Neural Engineering http://neuro.embs.org/2015/  will be held in Montpellier, France from April 22-24. One of the papers at that conference will be:

Closed-Loop DBS with Movement Intention by Jeffrey Herron, Tim Denison, and Howard Jay Chizeck

 

The 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)  http://icra2015.org/  will be held in Seattle from May25-May 30, 2015.  From our lab, the following papers have been accepted:

Semi-autonomous Simulated Brain Tumor Ablation with RavenII Surgical Robot using Behavior Tree by Danying Hu, Yuanzheng Gong, Blake Hannaford, and Eric J. Seibel

Sensor-Aided Teleoperated Grasp of Transparent Objects by Kevin Huang, Liang-Ting Jiang, Joshua R. Smith, and Howard Jay Chizeck

 

 

BioRobotics Lab attends annual Society for Neuroscience Meeting in Washington DC

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This last week members of the BioRobotics Lab traveled to Washington DC to present ongoing work in the areas of BCI privacy and security, BCI optimization, and closed-loop DBS at the annual Society for Neuroscience (SFN) meeting (http://www.sfn.org/). In addition to attending the main SFN conference, BRL researchers attended and discussed their research at several satellite conferences including the IEEE EMBS Brain Grand Challenges Conference and the 2014 INS Annual Meeting.

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BRL mentored summer students featured in CSNE YSP/REU Promotional Videos

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This summer, the BRL hosted a number of summer students from either local high-schools or various undergraduate programs. Hannah Werbel, now a highschool senior, was interviewed about her experiences in the Young Scholars Program (YSP) by the CSNE:

Also interviewed were Joi Officer and Francisco Garcia who discussed their research experiences through the Research Experience for Undergrads (REU) Program. Check out their video here:

BioRobotics Lab demonstrates research technologies at the IEEE Seattle 110th Anniversary Celebration

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SeattleIEEE110_JAHThis last Sunday evening, members of the UW BRL attended the IEEE Seattle Section’s 110th Anniversary Celebration event at the Seattle Pacific Center. Senator Maria Cantwell joined regional IEEE members to celebrate this impressive anniversary. Graduate student researchers Jeffrey Herron and Kevin Huang brought demos to the event to showcase ongoing research from the UW BioRobotics Lab.

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BioRobotics Lab Summer High School and Undergraduate Researchers

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This summer the BioRobotics Lab hosted great student researchers from local highschools and colleges from around the country! Their research was supported through the NSF Engineering Research Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering REU and YSP programs. Here is an overview of the great work these students did:

Alan Casalla, an Electrical Engineering Undergraduate from MIT, spent the summer working on microcontroller firmware and Android app development to aid in tremor research.
Alan Casalla, an electrical engineering undergraduate from MIT, spent the summer working on microcontroller-based sensor firmware and an Android application to aid in tremor research. He was mentored by Jeffrey Herron.
Ben Elliott, a senior at Mercer Island Highschool, volunteered this summer in the BRL to collaborate with Francisco Garcia to build sensory systems for lower-limb prosthetic users
Ben Elliott, a senior at Mercer Island Highschool, volunteered this summer in the BRL to collaborate with Francisco Garcia to build sensory systems for lower-limb prosthetic users. He was mentored by Iris Jiang.
Francisco Garcia, an Mechanical Engineering Undergraduate from SDSU, spent the summer building a system to sense the pressure distribution across the foot in order to provide sensory feedback for prosthetic users.
Francisco Garcia, a mechanical engineering undergraduate from SDSU, spent the summer building a system to sense the pressure distribution across the foot in order to provide sensory feedback for prosthetic users. He was mentored by Iris Jiang.
Joi Officer is a mathematics and engineering undergraduate from Spelman College. She spent the summer working on a tool to help automate TMR sensory mapping procedures.
Joi Officer is a mathematics and engineering undergraduate from Spelman College. She spent the summer working on a tool to help automate TMR sensory mapping procedures. She was mentored by Iris Jiang.
Hannah Werbel is going to be a senior at Skyline High School. She spent the summer learning how to use Matlab and Arduino to build tools for BCI security experimental data analysis.
Hannah Werbel is going to be a senior at Skyline High School. She spent the summer learning how to use Matlab and Arduino to build tools for BCI security experimental data analysis. She was mentored by Tamara Bonaci.

Thank you so much for your great work! You all show such great potential and we look forward to keeping track of your future achievements!

BRL attends Conference on Norbert Wiener in the 21st Century

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wiener-norbertWe presented two papers at the 2014 IEEE Conference on Norbert Wiener in the 21st Century! The conference was a discussion about the father of cybernetics and his contributions to technology and society. The papers presented were:

T. Bonaci, J. Herron, C. Matlack, H. J. Chizeck, ‘Securing the Exocortex: A Twenty-First Century Cybernetics Challenge’, the Proceedings of the IEEE 2014 Conference on Norbert Wiener in the 21st Century, Boston, MA, June 2014

J. Herron and H. J. Chizeck. Prototype Closed-Loop Deep Brain Stimulation Systems Inspired by Norbert Wiener. In the Proceedings of the IEEE 2014 Conference on Norbert Wiener in the 21st Century, Boston, MA, June 2014.