AWOL-ish and thoughts on experimental design

I know posts have been sparse here (the Digital Trends people haven't heard from me in months, really) but like usual, I am being overly ambitious on large projects and having to justify it while secretly plotting even larger ones.

Really, it comes down to having left the research world for 4 years, I expected some basic experiments to be completed. They're obvious, elemental, and simple, but act as cornerstones to further development. They weren't. Honestly, when I returned to academia, I didn't know what kind of project to work on and after a few talks with my advisers, it became clear that next to nothing I perceived as the logical next steps was accomplished. I actually remember the exact moment when it hit me - during a meeting when I was asking for thesis project suggestions. I recall literally stopping, staring off across the room, and thinking that either a) it was really a verify this in greater depth type of idea or b) Wow.

It isn't 'bad' - the push has been towards taking state of the art techniques and philosophies built from monkey work and applying it to the human side. Makes perfect sense. The problem is that there should always be a parallel thread building on the basic/elemental side of the equation. Working in people is different from monkeys (obviously), but the two biggest differences, and it takes some serious hammering to get them into your skull, are that you have the ability to convey concepts (not just processes) through language and you have access to unobserved processes. That means:

a) No training is needed for task familiarization (not talking procedural memory or 'mastery')
a1) Replication of monkey experiments should be performed at breakneck speed.
(Erm, unfortunate pun, but I leave it in because it correctly conveys the idea. Just noting that I did catch that.)
a2) Papers based on replicating monkey experiments require less effort (tasks already coded, expected results and caveats already mapped) and report less significant findings (i.e. - they become "Worked in monkeys. Yup, works in people." comparative studies).
a3) Should require either a novel functional outcome ("We can therefore do X with a BCI.") or provide insight on a monkey-impossible phenomenon ("Think about grandma's apple pie while you do X.").

b) Almost any experience once relegated to the world of 'cognitive neuroscience' becomes admissible. I know what it means to "recall the scent of a new car", so do you. Most of us do. There might be significant variance in what that scent actually is, but in understanding 'the brain's response to imagined new car smell', we all know the subject/object of reference. Take out these accepted experiential elements because of the artificial distinction in neuroscience sub-fields, and I would argue that ascribing any neural activity to any unobserved process (preparation, reward, saliency, etc.) must be eliminated, too. Sorry, no ascribing unobserved forces to activity, since you have no ability to say with complete certainty that monkeys operate in a conceptual/cognitive manner similar to humans. You're just anthropomorphizing mental or neural processes based on statistically significant relationships in a constrained environment, and you're dissociating environmental cues, not internal representations. Does that colony of monkeys happen to be full of synaesthetes? How many times do you hear, "Yeah, the monkey just didn't want to work today"? Or, "Yeah, the monkey got bored."? So, the data is collected only when the monkey "wants" to work?

So, in short, human BCI experiments should incorporate 'cognitive neuroscience' techniques in order to enrich the functional/translatable significance of the outcomes. I love to use the example of crossing the street. A BCI user should be able to recall crossing streets, imagine crossing the street in front of them, tell a joke about a particular chicken crossing a street, point across the street, and want to get to the other side of the street without stepping into traffic. Otherwise, we're doomed to becoming glorious reflex arcs.

(And for extra credit, imagine a world in which Sartrian angst is always acted on. Scary.)

Anyhow, I think that the state-of-the-art and elemental streams need to always be examined in parallel (even better in concert, but tougher to design and control). And, having already spent too much time typing this, I'll leave to you to consider why that is (hint: there are practical, moral, and theoretical reasons). Enjoy the brain twisting. :D

Hochberg article in NEJoM

Leigh has an article in this month's New England Journal of Medicine related to The Project. Required reading, of course.

Two basic problems

So, I constantly find myself banging my head against the wall because of two problems with the current BCI project. No, nothing juicy. Here they are, and let me know if you have any REAL way around them:

1) Patient data is strictly controlled due to obvious reasons. Why is this a major problem? Most of the really interesting and really applicable solutions to data management require some aspect of working in 'the cloud' - servers that are off site and under the management of some other entity. Examples would be Google, Amazon's S3, Drop Box, Microsoft Live Mesh, Apple's MoleMe (we're sorry - we lost your 'bi'. Here are two months of service for free!). They would be incredibly useful for us, but we can't be upping videos showing the participant's face (fine for our private meetings, but a big no-no for public viewing without signed consent). I use Live Mesh right now, and love it. I'm thinking of possibly switching to DropBox, since it is cross platform and offers similar features (folders that get synced automatically and available from any web browser).

2) Apple's obnoxious resurgence in the academic market and annoying ability to inspire some creative apps. Okay, kidding, somewhat, but every Mac owner I know tries to avoid using any Windows programs, even though they're quick to cite the Mac's ability to run Windows. "I don't want a Mac because there are way more programs available for Windows!" "That's what's great about Mac OS X... (insert latest Steve Jobs keynote speech verbatim)." VMware and Parallels are great, and a huge step beyond the days of VirtualPC (remember SoftPC?), but you're still settling for less than optimal performance. And there's that indescribable feeling that running another OS inside a primary OS just feels like whatever you do in your encapsulated OS is for simple utility. Anyways, the project is pretty evenly split between Macs and PCs (though more Macs at Brown). Macs tend to have better support in newer, flashier, and better thought out services and apps, at a price that is 10x's the comparable ugly PC app with the same features. PCs tend to have 15,000 apps to do any job you might ask, but you might switch around between them a little before settling. Those two cultures are mutually exclusive.

Wrap those two above problems in wanting some way to export everything in some standardized form that won't be obsolete for at least 15 years, and you got a total tech headache.

There are two things that would completely alleviate these issues:
- For issue 1 - strong encryption that is automatic end-to-end, with independently audited offsite servers. In order for this to be viable, I believe some regulations would have to be eased, which would take years, and requiring government specifications would result in ridiculous prices.
- For issue 2 - allow Mac OS to be virtualized. Most PC users aren't against installing MacOS. We just don't want to get a whole damn computer to run it and be stuck with it 24/7. You can't even hackintosh it appropriately (believe me, I tried and gave up after 2 days). I could dual boot with a patched install, but then running virtualization with access to my Windows feels very very risky. Oh, look at that. The hard drive controller isn't supported on Leopard, so every file has one bit shifted randomly. Too bad. No support.

We could implement some self hosted solution, but that requires a full time administrator with all types of certs. As it stands, we have a mix mash of services and techniques, and it all makes me uneasy. I need my tech organized and accessible. Like this (new office space :D )......