Cosyne 2005 Workshops
March 21-22, 2005
Snowbird, Utah
Workshop Title
Emerging Directions in Cortical Brain-Machine Interfaces for Control
Organizer(s)
Krishna Shenoy and Nicholas Hatsopoulos
Abstract
WORKSHOP GOALS: Our goal is to engage the speakers and participants in a discussion of emerging new directions in neural prosthetic motor systems. Over the past few years several groups have demonstrated proof-of-concept neural prosthetic systems capable of translating cortical neural signals into control signals for guiding external devices including computer cursors, robotic arms, and autonomous robots. We propose to spend the morning hearing from approximately four speakers who will provide the participants with an overview of the field and state of the art. We will ask these speakers to include at least one slide and spend at least 5 minutes discussing what they *speculate* to be exciting new areas for computationally oriented research. In the afternoon session we will again hear from four speakers, but these investigators will be from outside the usual neural prosthetic systems "orbit". The goal here is to hear from experts in fields that are starting to become, or may soon become, of great interest to the neural prosthesis community. Again the speakers will be asked to bring one slide and spend 5 minutes - this time *speculating* on how their field could meaningfully impact prosthetics research.
Emerging area topics for discussion may include: (1) the role that sensory feedback may play in neural prosthesis control including micro-stimulation based proprioceptive/somatosensory feedback, (2) what forms of plasticity / adaptation are being engaged by prosthetic systems, (3) the principled design of decoding algorithms, particularly adaptive algorithms, useful for different control applications and (4) which brain area(s) are best suited for sourcing signals for particular application(s).
WHY THE TOPIC IS OF INTEREST: The field of brain-machine interfaces is an important emerging area that brings together neuroscience, engineering, and computer science to solve clinically-relevant problems. The question of "where from here" in neural prosthetic system research is intriguing, and both those actively engaged in such research as well as those with just a passing interest may be interested in discussing some of the emerging opportunities. It is possible that many computationally-oriented COSYNE attendees would enjoy listening in, perhaps to see if an interesting problem to think about / work on pops up.
WHY IT SHOULD BE DISCUSSED: The field of neural prosthetic motor systems is very young and several new directions appear to be on the horizon. However, it is often unclear which directions are most important and which are feasible. By bringing together some current researchers in the area and some scientists in currently tangential areas, that could become more central, we hope to spark some new perspectives.
