Tracking neural plasticity for brain machine interfaces
Event details
| Date | 27.10.2014 |
| Hour | 14:00 › 15:00 |
| Speaker | Prof Yiwen Wang, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
Neuroplasticity plays an important role in behavior learning and adaptation to changes in the environment, ranging from cellular level to large scale cortical remapping. In brain machine interfaces (BMI), neural signals are translated into control commands on the prosthetic devices directly. BMI users may benefit by adapting the neural activities during learning to achieve more complicated movement tasks. However, the time-variant tuning of the decoder introduces the nonstationary issue to the signal processing of the neural activity, which results in the decay of the decoding performance over time. We are interested in observing and modeling the plasticity of neural tuning in a computational manner, which consequently contributes to the stable performance of brain machine interfaces. Collecting the multi-channel neural spike trains from the primary motor cortex of a primate, we decode the slowly-changing neural tuning during the kinematic estimation by dual Monte Carlo adaptive point process filtering. An alternative approach, a reinforcement learning based technique is developed to interpret the time-variant neural activities; this technique efficiently explores the high dimensional neural-state action space. Results show that the adaptive decoders could follow the nonstationary neural signals with more stable performance over multiple days.
Bio: Yiwen Wang received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from University of Science and Technology of China in 2001 and 2004 respectively. She received the Ph.D. degree from University of Florida, USA in 2008. She then joined the Department of Electronics and Computer Engineering as a Research Associate at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Kowloon, Hong Kong. In 2010, she joined the faculty of Qiushi Academy for Advanced Studies, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. She is currently an Associate Professor there. Her research interests are in neural decoding of brain-machine interfaces, adaptive signal processing, computational neuroscience, and neuromorphic engineering.
Bio: Yiwen Wang received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from University of Science and Technology of China in 2001 and 2004 respectively. She received the Ph.D. degree from University of Florida, USA in 2008. She then joined the Department of Electronics and Computer Engineering as a Research Associate at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Kowloon, Hong Kong. In 2010, she joined the faculty of Qiushi Academy for Advanced Studies, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. She is currently an Associate Professor there. Her research interests are in neural decoding of brain-machine interfaces, adaptive signal processing, computational neuroscience, and neuromorphic engineering.
Practical information
- Informed public
- Free
Organizer
- Prof S. Micera, Center for Neuroprosthetics
Contact
- Dr J. DiGiovanna