Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Workshop on An Application-oriented Approach to BCI out of the laboratory

Abstract

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the first Brain-Computer Interfaces workshop held as a part of the annual meetings of the Intelligent User Interfaces community. In principle, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) hold the promise for being the ultimate intelligent interfaces; what could surpass an interface that is able to interpret your thoughts and preferences, in real time, and behave accordingly? In practice, it is still not quite clear how BCIs can contribute to or replace existing interaction paradigms. The last 10-15 years BCI research focused on providing patients who lost their ability to communicate through the usual channels (speech) with ways of communication that are directly based on brain signals. While a lot of progress has been made, we suggest that it is also fruitful to view BCI as a means to obtain information from (healthy) individuals who go about their usual routines, where this information would otherwise have been lost. With this, it is important to understand BCI in the contexts of human natural behavior, of limitations in BCI accuracy, and of the envisioned application. For our workshop 'BCIforReal: An application-oriented approach to BCI out of the laboratory', we have received twelve submissions. After having received at least two reviews, eight of them were accepted as proceeding papers. The papers cover several application areas (driving, head mounted display imaging, text annotation and neurofeedback), as well as going into methodological issues and into ways of bringing BCI(-like) applications in contact with a larger audience. Several authors point out the potential of fusing multiple sources of (physiological) information in conjunction with brain signals. Besides the presenters of the eight papers, we are happy to have several additional speakers. It is an honor to have Prof. Dr. Benjamin Blankertz from the Technical University of Berlin as a keynote speaker to kick-off the workshop. His talk is entitled 'Applications of BCI Technology Beyond Communication And Control'. Furthermore, Dr. Chris McClernon, International Program Officer at the Air Force Research Laboratory's European Office of Aerospace Research and Development, will give a talk on the goals of his prospective neuro-ergonomics program, which we expect to be of great interest to the participants of the workshop. The workshop will be closed with brainstorm activities and discussions in order to give the participants the opportunity to discuss their questions, concerns, share ideas, obtain feedback, generate new ideas and initiate collaborations.