The Reservoir Lab was selected to participate in the Human Brain Project, a European Flagship project. You can watch an interview with prof. Schrauwen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-mQ6iH6zgY&t=34m17s or read more at http://www.schamper.ugent.be/524/the-human-brain-project.
HBP-videoverview from Human Brain Project on Vimeo.
A Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) allows one to control a computer by thought. Such a system works by analyzing the user’s brain activity to discover their intended action. The P300-based BCI speller, introduced in 1988, allows patients to type simply by looking at the desired characters. Up until now, it was necessary to calibrate the P300 speller. During such a calibration session, the patient has to spell a predefined text. Analyzing the recorded brain signals in combination with the given text allows the computer to learn how the brain waves indicate the desired characters. These calibration sessions are very time-consuming and have to be repeated for every new patient. The novel system does not need any calibration. The patient can start spelling right away. The BCI system needs a very limited amount of characters to discover the underlying structure of the brain signals. After that, the system performs as well as a fully calibrated system. This breakthrough brings us another step closer to widespread use of such a Brain-Computer Interface.
The largest European robotics competition took place in Vienna last weekend. Over 500 robot builders from more than 20 countries participated in over 10 categories. Six engineering students from the bachelor and master of engineering at Ghent University were selected by the UGent IEEE sb WELEK robot competition jury to participate in the MegaSumo category.The students took up the challenge and spent their free time building an autonomous sumo robot. As the only Belgian team they competed - for the first time - with over 20 robots in the toughest category. After a sleepless week and an even more frantic weekend of programming, soldering and tweaking, they reached the finals and finished in fifth place after being defeated by the Lituanian contest winners.
