BrainHack
Dalhousie’s first-ever Neuroscience hackathon!
March 9-11, 2018
Department of Psychology & Neuroscience, Life Sciences Centre
Presented by the RADIANT Neurotechnology Innovation program, with support from the Brain Repair Centre and ShiftKey Labs.
As part of international Brain Awareness Week, the goal of this hackathon is to bring together students in computer science, neuroscience, psychology, and related fields to develop creative applications of neuroimaging data.
Teams of students will work over the weekend to develop a novel brain-computer interface (BCI). BCIs are ways of controlling software and hardware using measures brain activity. In this hackathon, teams will have access to EEG (brainwave) datasets, and will use the OpenViBE BCI software package to harness critical features within the data to control an application such as a video game. A number of open source EEG data sets designed for BCIs will be available (you don’t need your own EEG system!).
No specific background is required for the hackathon — it’s meant as a chance to learn and discover! The OpenViBE package is well-documented and has a graphical interface, and provides APIs to output the data to common languages such as Python, Matlab, Lua, and C++, and even Ogre3D for VR.
For inspiration, check out these videos:
Schedule
Friday, March 9 |
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| 5:00 | Mixer: Introduction to BCIs and the hackathon |
| 6:00 | social hour for team formation |
Saturday, March 10 |
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| 9:30 – 10:00 | Welcome, ground rules |
| 10:30 – 12:00 | Start hacking! |
| 12:00 – 1:00 | lunch (provided) |
| 1:00 – 5:00 | Keep hacking |
| 5:00 – 6:00 | dinner (provided) |
| 6:00 – later | Keep hacking (optional) |
Sunday, March 11 |
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| 9:30 – 12:00 | keep hacking |
| 12:00 – 1:00 | lunch (provided) |
| 1:00 – 4:00 | Final presentations, judging, and prizes |
Technical Mentors
The hackathon will start with an introduction to OpenViBE and a live EEG demo. A number of Dalhousie faculty and grad students with experience in BCI and EEG will be on hand to answer questions.
Competition
Hackathons are more fun with prizes! A team of EEG experts will judge the final projects on Sunday afternoon. The top team will share a $200 prize (awarded as Amazon gift cards).
This is also a chance to prove yourself and get noticed — many neuroscience labs and profs will be involved as mentors and judges. Our labs are always on the lookout for smart, talented coders. This could open doors to something big!
Judging Criteria
Innovation: How novel and creative is the approach to characterizing the brain signals, and/or the use of the brain signals?
Reliability: How reliably does the application work (ideally across multiple datasets of the same type)?
Relevance: Does the application have clear relevance to a particular domain (e.g., rehabilitation, entertainment)? Is there value added to using the BCI, or is the application a overly-complex solution to a simple problem?
Presentation: Did the team present their project in a clear, understandable way? Were any things not explained, or contradictory?
Rules
- All participants must be registered students at a post-secondary institution
- Bring your own computer. OpenViBE is officially supported on Windows 10, Windows 7, Ubuntu (14.04 and 16.04), and Fedora 25, and may work on some other versions of Linux. It does not work on OS X; Mac users should install Windows via BootCamp or try a virtual machine.
- All participants must register online in advance of the event start date and time or at the door, no later than noon on March 10. Please refer to the schedule for more information.
- To be eligible for prizes, at least one team member must present the team’s solution, in-person, at the hackathon
- All prizes will be distributed equally amongst each group member of the presenting team
- Prizes are non-negotiable and cannot be substituted
Registration
Registration is closed.
Questions? contact BrainHack@NCIL.science
Sponsors
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