Rapid development within the biomedical engineering field, especially Brain-Neural-Computer Interaction (BNCI) area, provides a solid technological base for new implicit interaction based applications aimed at novel entertainment paradigms (Subtopic1) or for improving health and quality of life (Subtopic2).
Subtopic1: "Cinema and neuroscience: recent research and future applications". Current neuroscience research increasingly relies on naturalistic experimental stimuli and taps into different temporal scales of our perceptual, cognitive and emotional experiences. Both virtual reality scenarios and cinematic materials are used for such experiments. These neurocinematic studies often use inter-subject correlations of brain activity to assess film-viewing experiences. When combined with interactive cinema technologies, real-time brain imaging allows for implicit and unconscious interaction with audio-visual media. In such "enactive" systems, changes in the psychophysiological reactions of viewers (enactors) can determine the content in the presented narrative. Besides entertainment, such neurocinematic applications provide an excellent tool for various research topics including social and second-person neuroscience.
Subtopic2: "B-Reactable: multimodal tabletop system for collaborative physiology monitoring and training". In B-reactable project (2013-2015), we are designing, validating and optimizing a novel multimodal system - B-Reactable - linking a tangible musical tabletop interface with BNCI technology for collaborative physiology monitoring and training in future health and professional applications. This interdisciplinary research project is based on the joint pilot work with Prof. Jorda and Sebastian Mealla, University of Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, started in 2010. In the envisioned B-Reactable applications, users will explicitly or implicitly learn to monitor and control their physiological signals using tangible objects, and hence, understand and influence their cognitive or emotional states.
Sobre el invitado
Dr. Aleksander Väljamäe
Principal research fellow
Department of Behavioural Sciences and Learning
Linköping University, Sweden.
Aleksander Väljamäe received his PhD in applied acoustics at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden, in 2007. During his PhD studies concerning multisensory perception he was a visiting researcher at University of Barcelona and NTT Communication Science Labs, Japan. In 2007-2010 he was a postdoctoral fellow and the psychophysiology lab director at SPECS Laboratory, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain. In 2010-2011 he was a senior postdoctoral fellow at Neuropsychology Laboratory, University of Graz, and Graz BCI lab, Technical University of Graz, Austria. Currently he is a principal research fellow (Marie Curie IOF) at Department of Behavioural Sciences and Learning, Linköping University, Sweden. He has been active in a number of EU funded projects: POEMS, PRESENCCIA, BrainAble, TOBI, Future BNCI, CONTRAST and GALA; and as an external expert for EC. His psychophysiology research concerns how audiovisual media influence humans on perceptual, cognitive and emotional levels, with particular stress on the novel methods for diagnosis and treatment of various brain disorders (e.g. autism, depression, migraine) and new applications (Brain-Computer Interfaces, neurocinema). Dr. Väljamäe also participate actively in art and science projects, e.g., his technical directing of the “Multimodal Brain Orchestra” performance in 2009, Prague (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8016869.stm), and supporting video roadmapping activities of Future BNCI project (https://vimeo.com/26976145).
