User:FBNCI

The Annual BCI Research Award is an annual accolade to recognize excellence in the field of brain-computer interface (BCI) research. The award is open to any person or group in any country. Each year, a different institute known for BCI research is chosen to host the award. This institute selects a jury from established researchers within the BCI community, which selects ten nominees and then a winner. The winner receives $3,000 and a statue at a gala awards ceremony attached to a major conference. Guger Technologies OG (g.tec), a company headquartered in Austria that manufactures BCI productswww.gtec.at, pays for the award, dinner, and other costs.

Selection criteria and procedure
The jury is instructed to score all projects based on the following criteria:
 * Does the project include a novel application of the BCI?
 * Is there any new methodological approach used compared to earlier projects?
 * Is there any new benefit for potential users of a BCI?
 * Is there any improvement in terms of speed of the system (e.g. bit/min)?
 * Is there any improvement in terms of accuracy of the system?
 * Does the project include any results obtained from real patients or other potential users?
 * Does the approach work online/in real-time?
 * Is there any improvement in terms of usability?
 * Does the project include any novel hardware or software developments?

Each year, the Annual BCI Research Award follows a rigorous, structured schedule to encourage the best submissions, ensure the most effective decisionmaking processes, and maximize the impact. This section describes the general timeline for each annual. Since the Award is presented at a major conference, the exact dates change each year, but the general procedure will not change.


 * Preceding year (after last year’s award): g.tec selects the date and location of the award ceremony, identifies the institute that will host the award, and chooses the Chairman of the Jury.
 * January: The awarding institute selects the jury, submission deadline, and other details. The award is announced through various means, such as email, website postings, and word of mouth.
 * About two months before the award ceremony: all submissions must be emailed to the jury. The jury chooses ten nominees.
 * About one month before the award ceremony: the nominees are publicly announced.
 * Award Ceremony: The winner is announced at the award ceremony. The ceremony is always scheduled with a major conference, so the exact date and venue changes each year.

2012 award
The 2012 award will be presented at a dinner ceremony at the 2012 Society for Neuroscience (SfN) conference in November 2012 in New Orleans, Louisiana. The annual SfN conference is a well-established venue for presenting BCI research.

The 2012 jury is:

Eric Leuthardt, M.D. (Chairman of the Jury),

Gert Pfurtscheller, Ph.D.,

Leigh Hochberg, M.D, Ph.D.,

Gerwin Schalk, Ph.D.,

Moritz Grosse-Wentrup, Ph.D.,

Junichi Ushiba, Ph.D.

2011 award
The 2011 award was presented at a dinner ceremony at the Hotel Weitzer in Graz, Austria. The ceremony was scheduled around 5th International Brain-Computer Interface Conference, which was held in Graz from Sept. 22-24, 2011. The awarding institute was the Laboratory of Brain-Computer Interfaces, Institute for Knowledge Discovery, Graz University of Technology, which also hosted the conference. Prof. Gert Pfurtscheller, the Chairman of the Jury, presented the award, and the ceremony was emceed by Dr. Brendan Allison. In addition to Prof. Pfurtscheller, the 2011 jury consisted of Robert Leeb, Cuntai Guan, Theresa Vaughan, Michael Tangermann, and Jane Huggins. The ceremony featured over 100 attendees from the BCI community, and featured a Distinguished Special Guest, Prof. Jacques Vidal. Prof. Vidal is the inventor of BCIs (Vidal, 1973, 1977), as widely noted in review articles and book chapters (Wolpaw et al., 2002 ; Allison et al., 2007 , 2012 ; Wolpaw and Wolpaw, 2012 ). 64 projects were submitted for the 2011 award. The ten projects that were nominated showed the breadth of BCI research. The projects reflected a range of different sensor types, including BCIs based on single cell recordings, invasive recordings with implanted electrodes on the cortex, and non-invasive scalp recordings. A range of BCI applications were also nominated, including BCIs for speech recognition, stroke rehabilitation, and robotic device control.

The ten nominees, presented in alphabetical order by first author, are:

Tim Blakely, Kai Miller, Jeffrey Ojemann, Rajesh Rao (University of Washington, USA)

Exploring the cortical dynamics of learning by leveraging BCI paradigms.

Jonathan S. Brumberg, Philip R. Kennedy, Frank H. Guenther (Boston University, USA)

An auditory output brain-computer interface for speech communication.

Samuel Clanton, Robert Rasmussen, Zohny Zohny, Meel Velliste, S. Morgan Jeffries, Angus McMorland, Andrew Schwartz (Carnegie Mellon University, University of Pittsburgh, USA)

Seven degree of freedom cortical control of a robotic arm.

Felix Darvas (University of Washington, USA)

Utilizing high gamma (HG) band power changes as control signal for non-invasive BCI.

Elisabeth V. C. Friedrich, Reinhold Scherer, Christa Neuper (University of Graz, Austria)

User-appropriate and robust control strategies to enhance brain computer interface performance and usability.

Moritz Grosse-Wentrup, Bernhard Schölkopf (Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Germany)

What are the neuro-physiological causes of performance variations in brain-computer interfacing?

Eric C. Leuthardt, Charles Gaona, Mohit Sharma, Nicholas Szrama, Jarod Roland, Zac Freudenberg, Jamie Solis, Jonathan Breshears, Gerwin Schalk (Washington University in St. Louis, USA)

Using the electrocorticographic speech network to control a brain-computer interface in humans

Daniele De Massari, Carolin Ruf, Adrian Furdea, Sebastian Halder, Tamara Matuz, Niels Birbaumer (University of Tübingen, IRCCS, International Max Planck Research School, Germany)

Towards communication in the completely locked-in state: neuroelectric semantic conditioning BCI.

Qibin Zhao, Akinari Onishi, Yu Zhang, Andrzej Cichocki (RIKEN, Japan)

An affective BCI using multiple ERP components associated to facial emotion processing.

Raphael Zimmermann, Laura Marchal-Crespo, Olivier Lambercy, Marie-Christine Fluet, Jean-Claude Metzger, Johannes Brand, Janis Edelmann, Kynan Eng, Robert Riener, Martin Wolf, Roger Gassert (ETH Zürich, Switzerland)

'''What's your next move? Detecting movement intention for stroke rehabilitation.'''

The winning submission was:

Moritz Grosse-Wentrup, Bernhard Schölkopf (Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen, Germany)

What are the Neuro-Physiological Causes of Performance Variations in Brain-Computer Interfacing?



2010 award
The 2010 award was presented at a dinner ceremony with over 100 attendees from the BCI community on the Asilomar Conference grounds near Monterey, California. The ceremony was scheduled around the BCI Meeting 2010, which was held on the same grounds from 31 May until 4 June 2010. The awarding institute was the Wadsworth Center, represented by Prof. Gerwin Schalk. The 2010 jury consisted of Gerwin Schalk, Eric Sellers, Dean Krusienski, Klaus-Robert Müller, Bo Hong, and Benjamin Blankertz. 60 projects were submitted for the 2010. The ten nominees, presented in alphabetical order by first author, are:

Guangyu Bin, Xiaorong Gao, Shangkai Gao (Tsinghua University, China)

A high speed word spelling BCI system based on code modulated visual evoked potentials

Steven M. Chase, Andrew S. Whitford, and Andrew B. Schwartz (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)

Operant conditioning to identify independent, volitionally-controllable patterns of neural activity

Cuntai Guan, Kai Keng Ang, Karen Sui Geok Chua, Beng Ti Ang (A*STAR, Singapore)

Motor imagery-based Brain-Computer Interface robotic rehabilitation for stroke

Jing Guo, Shangkai Gao, Bo Hong (Tsinghua University, China)

An active auditory BCI for intention expression in locked-in

Kimiko Kawashima, Keiichiro Shindo, Junichi Ushiba, Meigen Liu (Keio University, Japan)

Neurorehabilitation for Chronic-Phase Stroke using a Brain-Machine Interface

Tao Liu, Shangkai Gao, Bo Hong (Tsinghua University, China)

Brain-actuated Google search by using motion onset VEP

Jana Muenssinger, Harry George, Sebastian Halder, Adi Hoesle, Andrea Kübler (Universität Tübingen, Germany)

Brain Painting - "Paint your way out"

Mark Palatucci, Dean Pomerleau, Geoff Hinton, Tom Mitchell (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)

Thought Recognition with Semantic Output Codes

David B. Ryan and Eric W. Sellers (East Tennessee State University, USA)

Predictive Spelling with a P300-based BCI: Increasing Communication Rate

George Townsend (Algoma University BCI Lab, Canada)

Innovations in P300-based BCI Stimulus Presentation Methods

The ten nominated projects have been published in the book “Recent Advances in Brain-Computer Interface Systems,” edited by Reza Fazel, InTech, 2011: State-of-the-Art in BCI research: BCI Award 2010. The winning submission was:

Cuntai Guan, Kai Keng Ang, Karen Sui Geok Chua, Beng Ti Ang (A*STAR, Singapore)

Motor imagery-based Brain-Computer Interface robotic rehabilitation for stroke

In addition to the usual awards, the winner also received an autographed copy of the book “A Practical guide to Brain-Computer Interfacing with BCI2000”http://www.intechopen.com/articles/show/title/state-of-the-art-in-bci-research-bci-award-2010.



Associated Events
There are a few other awards for BCI research. For example, the Berlin BCI group has hosted several Data Analysis Competitions. These competitions provide data from different types of BCIs (such as P300, ERD, or SSVEP), and competitors attempt to develop data analysis algorithms that can most accurately classify new data. The recently announced HCI Challenge instead focuses on improving the human-computer interaction within BCIs, such as through more natural and friendly interfaces. The X-Prize Foundation lists X-Prizes for BCI and Enduring Brain Computer Communication as “Concepts Under Consideration.”http://www.xprize.org/prize-development/life-sciences#brain The Gao group at Tsinghua University in Beijing coordinated an online BCI competition at a conference that they hosted in 2010. The Annual BCI Research Award is the only general award open to any facet of BCI research.