Artificial Intelligence for Brain–Computer Interface

Damien Coyle is Professor of Neurotechnology, UKRI Turing AI Acceleration Fellow, and Director of the Bath Institute for the Augmented Human at the University of Bath, and Professor of Neurotechnology at Ulster University. His research develops advanced artificial intelligence methods for decoding electrophysiological signals and translating them into reliable control signals for brain-computer interface (BCI) systems. His work emphasises scalable clinical translation, including multi-site trials and real-world deployment with patient populations such as spinal cord injury, stroke, disorders of consciousness, Locked-In Syndrome and post-traumatic stress disorder. He is Founder and CEO of NeuroCONCISE Ltd, an award-winning company developing AI-enabled wearable neurotechnology platforms.

Prof. Riccardo Poli is with the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering at the University of Essex, where he has been a full professor of Computer Science since 2001. A biomedical engineer by training, he holds a 6-year MEng in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Florence (summa cum laude) and earned a distinguished dissertation award for his PhD work on the computer vision of medical images using AI and Neural Networks. Following a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship with the National Research Council, he joined the University of Birmingham as a Lecturer in AI and subsequently became a Reader in Evolutionary and Emergent Behaviour Intelligence and Computation (1994-2001). At Essex, he co-founded the Brain Computer Interfaces and Neural Engineering Lab in 2003, which he co-directed for a number of years. Bringing over 38 years of experience in Symbolic AI and 35 years in Neural Networks to his research, and 33 years of Evolutionary Computation and Genetic Programming, and 23 years of Neural Engineering and BCI. Prof. Poli has co-authored over 500 articles and 2 books, accumulating more than 34,000 Scholar citations. He was an associate editor (and now is on the advisory board) of Evolutionary Computation (MIT Press), an associate editor of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines (Kluwer), Applied Soft Computing, and Swarm Intelligence, and is still an associate editor for Frontiers in Neuroergonomics. Interestingly, prior to finding his ultimate vocation in scientific research, he spent a decade playing in rock and blues bands.

Professor Tom Carlson is Professor of Assistive Robotics at University College London (UCL), Vice-Dean (Education) for the Faculty of Medical Sciences, and Head of Education for the Division of Surgery and Interventional Science. Based in Aspire CREATe, UCL's Centre for Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology, his research focuses on assistive robotics, shared control, and advanced human-machine interfaces that enhance independence for people with disabilities. A Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA) and co-Director of the MSc in Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technologies, he obtained his MEng in Electrical and Electronic Engineering and PhD in Intelligent Robotics from Imperial College London before undertaking postdoctoral research at EPFL, Switzerland. Since joining UCL in 2013, he has contributed to major European research programmes in smart wheelchairs and brain-machine interfaces, including CROWDBOT, ADAPT, TOBI, NCCR Robotics, and the INRIA-associated ISI4NAVE collaboration. He is a founding member of the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society Technical Committee on Shared Control.

Aleksandra Vuckovic holds an MEng in Engineering Physics and an MSc in Control Systems from the University of Belgrade. She received her Ph.D. from the Centre for Sensory-Motor Interaction, Aalborg University, Denmark in 2004, where she has also served as PostDoc. Between 2005 and 2007 she worked as a senior research officer at the Brain-Computer Interface Group, Department of Computer Science, University of Essex. Since 2008 she has been with the James Watt School of Engineering, University of Glasgow. Aleksandra is interested in Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) as a new form of non-muscular channel for communication between patients and their environment, which compensates a loss of sensory-motor functions or alternatively provides strengthening or modulation of preserved neuro-muscular pathways in patients with impairments of the Central Nervous System. She is in particular interested in developing and implementing patient-managed Brain-Computer Interface systems for home-based neurorehabilitation. Further areas of interest are improvements of existing rehabilitation therapies combining Brain-Computer Interface and Functional Electrical Stimulation and exploring a correlation between the recovery and changes in the brain responses i.e., brain plasticity. She also applies BCI for operant conditioning training of the brain (neurofeedback) for the treatment of Central Neuropathic pain following injuries to the Spinal Cord. Her research further focuses on EEG as a neuroimaging modality to identify markers of neuropathic pain (diagnostic, predictive, and prognostic). She uses machine learning techniques to develop transferable individualized markers of pain to aid stratified pain prevention and treatment.

Jacques Carolan is a founding Programme Director at ARIA and Honorary Associate Professor at UCL. He is an applied physicist by training, having spent 10 years developing photonic technologies to accelerate quantum and classical computing, initially at MIT and then at the Niels Bohr Institute. He then pivoted into systems neuroscience, where he developed optical technologies for high-speed, large-scale interrogation of neural circuits in vivo at UCL. At ARIA he leads the Precision Neurotechnologies programme, which is developing next-generation circuit-level tools to help understand and repair the human brain. He completed his PhD at the University of Bristol in 2015. He has been awarded a BBSRC Discovery Fellowship, a Marie-Sklodowska Curie Global Fellowship and attended the 66th Lindau Nobel Laureates Meeting.