It is now safe to turn off your interface

So, it's been a while since I posted anything, and I probably fell off everyone's radar over the past couple years, but I wanted to give a brief explanation.

Once I started getting data for my thesis project, I put everything else on the back burner, including my health. I gained some weight, which wasn't unexpected, but that set off a cascade of problems. Thesis work slowed to a crawl and tasks that usually took a day were taking weeks. What I thought was just mental fog from poor sleep and stress turned out to be one of the most severe cases of sleep apnea my doctor had ever seen.

I took a year to focus on my health, which has been an incredibly slow process, before sitting down to churn out the rest of the thesis document. My advisor went on an extended sabbatical to run a scientific institute in Europe after agreeing to review the document progress, forcing me to finish the whole process through my thesis committee. That process took 2 years, but in July, I (finally) successfully defended my dissertation.

"The document" (Is this considered prior publication?)

That's the VERY short version of the toughest 5 years of my life. Now I have a PhD in Neuroscience from Brown University for work in the field of implantable brain-computer interfaces as part of the BrainGate project and John Donoghue's lab. I am very grateful for all the support I received from students and staff, and especially my thesis committee (David Sheinberg, Leigh Hochberg, Mike Paradiso, and Phil Kennedy).

When people hear the details, they always ask, "Was it worth it?" Much of the experience was incredibly rewarding and I worked alongside many brilliant people. But, having been through it, I could never recommend graduate school to anyone. At least not yet. As with all schooling, the value of the experience is really determined by the opportunities it unlocks. So, when asked if it was a worthwhile endeavor, I always respond, "It depends on what comes next."

Next?

Resume
( Download )

LinkedIn

Email

I'm now looking for industry positions that will take advantage of my background in alternative interfaces, technology, medicine, science, and business. That could mean VR, AR, BCIs, assistive devices, HIDs, etc, but I'm not interested in a traditional post-doc arrangement. The bigger, more complex, and more disruptive the problem, the better.

For others in a similar situation, but with less experience between undergrad and grad school, check out Free the PhD, a project by my friend Vay who also left academia for industry. There's plenty of good advice there regarding the differences between academic and corporate general mindset and communication.

For now, DNI will be placed in suspended animation. It was awesome conversing with all of you here and at conferences and workshops. I will post small status updates from time-to-time, but this will be all for now. Thanks much!

BrainGate2 clinical trial is go

That's right! Everyone's favorite Neural Interface System, filled to the brim with Brain-Computer Interfaceyness, BrainGate, is continuing clinical trials, sans Cyberkinetics. Massachusetts General Hospital will serve as the home base, with close ties to Brown and Harvard universities and the Providence VA Hospital. Leigh Hochberg takes the helm as PI and lead investigator along with John Donoghue. The project is being called BrainGate2 in part to denote advancement in the systems, techniques and understanding used in designing and implementing an NIS. People looking for more information, including participant enrollment, can check out the below links and Braingate2.org.

Clinical trials page on BrainGate2.org website
ClinicalTrials.gov entry

Brown University release
GenEngNews article
Boston Globe article
Providence Journal article
PhysOrg article

Reddit catch
Twitter catches

Calling out the impostor

If you are familiar with BCIs you probably have heard of the project I work on, called BrainGate. I'm a grad student in John Donoghue's lab, though the thoughts and opinions on DNI are entirely my own. I generally try to keep all things related to the 'project' at a very superficial level, due to the FDA/patient confidentiality/my generally responsible nature, and report on news items there as I do with any other project (when they hit the mainstream news agencies).

But, there was something brought to my attention the other day regarding our project that I think needs to be examined. Apparently, someone with no affiliation to the project, no interaction with anyone on the project, and obviously no scruples owns the top level domain (TLD) for the project's name. I'm not going to link to it, since this poser doesn't deserve any traffic, but I wanted to put out the word to the core BCI researchers, students, and labs that keep up with DNI, that http://www.braingate2.org is the ONLY official site for the project. (Yes, that is just a placeholder page with a few links, and the full launch will be mentioned here.)

The BrainFake site, as I will now refer to our charlatan friend, isn't particularly 'bad', I mean, at least he links to the real site under the clinical trials section, but essentially we have someone confusing people interested in the project, stealing attention, providing unverified information, and just generally passing themselves off as the real deal. This is probably one of those people that just went and registered swineflu.com so he could redirect traffic to his lucrative online natural Viagra website, so we're talking parasitic to the nth degree and not some scientist I just happen to disagree with.

Anyone have any ideas on how to deal with this type of situation? My usual inclination is to use 'hired thugs', but that route always seems to get voted down by others. (obviously kidding)

A week away

So, I underestimated the amount of work leading up to my prelim defense, and going to start my little break now-ish. It isn't the prelim work as much as the other stuff, like my little Thunderbird on a USB stick took forever to configure perfectly, and was then corrupted by an old version of TrueCrypt hiding on one of my computers. *poof* All that work disappeared. Ugh. Not sure how to handle that now, but might have to think up a little hack to make it work properly.

In the meantime, here are a few stories...

Serious:
60 Minutes covered DEKA on Sunday. Thank you to the 20-ish people that let me know about it, including my parents. They're silly. They still live in a world where missing a TV show means you have to wait for the rerun. Video clip is up on the 60 Minutes site.

This best computer interfaces story is a trip down memory lane.

Pravda has a very vague and almost not worth reading article on a Russian BCI group.

The Boston Globe discusses some of the hurdles of setting up an implantable BCI project, and chronicles the situation over at the now defunct Cyberkinetics. I don't want to say anything about the project that could anger one of the 14,000 government institutions regulating aspects of it (kidding on the number btw), so I will point to here (yes, the page is in a very very early alpha state).

And some sort of licensing setup for ECoG algorithms has been setup with a company called Neurolutions. (Really? Neurolutions? Have we gotten to the point where all the good brain related names are taken? Even DNI, which was a 3am, caffeine-induced hyper-mania induced naming beats the snot out of that.)

Seriously?:
I could bring myself to watch this clip, but here's the title:
"Robotic baby seal has healing powers" - CNN (also known as, "We fired out entire science department, but what could go wrong?" News)
Video clip. Be sure to get the tshirt, too.