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Monkeys walk around a virtual world using only their thoughts
Researchers hope the experiments will pave the way for people with paralysis to explore virtual worlds or more intuitively control electric wheelchairs in this one. Peter Janssen at KU Leuven in Belgium and colleagues implanted three rhesus macaque ( Macaca mulatta) monkeys with BCIs. Crucially, each animal got three implants, each consisting of 96 electrodes, positioned in the primary motor, dorsal and ventral premotor cortex. The first area is commonly used in BCI research and relates to physical movement, but the latter two are thought to be involved in planning movement in a higher, more abstract way. Electrical signals from the implants were then interpreted by an AI model and used to control VR avatars as the monkeys watched a 3D monitor.
Neural decoding from stereotactic EEG: accounting for electrode variability across subjects
Deep learning based neural decoding from stereotactic electroencephalography (sEEG) would likely benefit from scaling up both dataset and model size. To achieve this, combining data across multiple subjects is crucial. However, in sEEG cohorts, each subject has a variable number of electrodes placed at distinct locations in their brain, solely based on clinical needs. Such heterogeneity in electrode number/placement poses a significant challenge for data integration, since there is no clear correspondence of the neural activity recorded at distinct sites between individuals. Here we introduce seegnificant: a training framework and architecture that can be used to decode behavior across subjects using sEEG data.
Brain Treebank: Large-scale intracranial recordings from naturalistic language stimuli
We present the Brain Treebank, a large-scale dataset of electrophysiological neural responses, recorded from intracranial probes while 10 subjects watched one or more Hollywood movies. Subjects watched on average 2.6 Hollywood movies, for an average viewing time of 4.3 hours, and a total of 43 hours. The audio track for each movie was transcribed with manual corrections. Word onsets were manually annotated on spectrograms of the audio track for each movie. Each transcript was automatically parsed and manually corrected into the universal dependencies (UD) formalism, assigning a part of speech to every word and a dependency parse to every sentence. In total, subjects heard over 38,000 sentences (223,000 words), while they had on average 168 electrodes implanted. This is the largest dataset of intracranial recordings featuring grounded naturalistic language, one of the largest English UD treebanks in general, and one of only a few UD treebanks aligned to multimodal features. We hope that this dataset serves as a bridge between linguistic concepts, perception, and their neural representations. To that end, we present an analysis of which electrodes are sensitive to language features while also mapping out a rough time course of language processing across these electrodes.
How BYD Got EV Chargers to Work Almost as Fast as Gas Pumps
The Chinese automaker is racing ahead of global competitors--but don't expect to see those gains in the US anytime soon. Somehow, the whole thing got even faster. Earlier this month, Chinese automaker BYD announced that its Flash Chargers, first rolled out a year ago, can now charge some electric vehicle batteries from around 10 to 70 percent in five minutes, and from 10 to full in about nine. That's more than 600 miles of range in the time it takes to order a cappuccino and leave a nice tip. The new BYD chargers can add miles super quickly because they deliver up to 1,500 kilowatts (kW) per charge.
Granger Components Analysis: Unsupervised learning of latent temporal dependencies
Here the concept of Granger causality is employed to propose a new criterion for unsupervised learning that is appropriate in the case of temporally-dependent source signals. The basic idea is to identify two projections of a multivariate time series such that the Granger causality among the resulting pair of components is maximized.