M-ITI Official Inauguration

Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute (M-ITI) had the official inauguration of the new facilities at Madeira Tecnopolo building. Our lab (NeuroRehab) had the chance to present the undergoing research in Cognitive and Motor rehabilitation and to demonstrate our virtual rehabilitation tools.
Among others our interactive rehabilitation tools had been demonstrated to the vice-president of Madeira.

VSMM 2012

A few weeks ago, a co-authored with colleagues from the Interactive Worlds Applied Research Group (iWARG) and the Serious Games Institute (SGI) paper, was presented at the 18th International Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia, Virtual Systems in the Information Society (VSMM 2012). The conference took place at Milan, Italy, 2-5 September 2012 and the paper was titled ‘Brain-Controlled Serious Games for Cultural Heritage’.

The paper proposes a prototype system for cultural heritage based on brain computer interfaces for navigating and interacting with serious games. An interactive serious cultural heritage game was developed based on commercial BCI headsets controlling virtual agents in the ancient city of Rome. Initial results indicate that brain computer technologies can be very useful for the creation of interactive serious games.

Visit at CERN

A very interesting visit at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (French: Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire) took place after visiting Geneva. CERN is the world's largest particle physics laboratory, which is situated in the northwest suburbs of Geneva on the Franco–Swiss border established in 1954.

In the field of Computing, CERN is the birth-place of WWW with the first web server, grid computing, and the first IP router deployed in Europe by CISCO

At EPFL CNBI lab

Recently visited the lab of CNBI, the Defitech Foundation Chair in Non-Invasive Brain-Machine Interface at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland. The focus of their research is on BCI assisted  robotic wheelchairs and neuroprosthetics beign part of the EPFL Center for Neuroprosthetics and Institute of Bioengineering (IBI).

Dr Tom Carlson, Research Associate of CNBI gave me a really interesting and comprehensive tour at the lab with a small demonstration of the Collaborative Control Robotic Wheelchair, BCI telepresence and the NISSAN car simulation measuring drivers cognitive states (video).

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IUCC-2012

A new paper: "Robot Navigation using Brain-Computer Interfaces" has been accepted at the 11th IEEE International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing and Communications - IUCC-2012 (held in Liverpool, UK, 25-27 June 2012),  and will be published in the conference proceedings by IEEE Computer Society press.
All papers were carefully peer-reviewed and ranked according to their original contribution, quality, presentation and relevance to the themes of the conference. At end, less than 30% high-quality papers have been selected.

Title:  Robot Navigation using Brain-Computer Interfaces
Authors:  Athanasios Vourvopoulos,  Fotis Liarokapis

1st place at the Universities Challenge - Posters evening

Best poster price at the "Universities Challenge" for my undergoing research in Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI's) and Virtual Worlds has been awarded at the "Posters Evening" at the University of Warwick - Computer Science building, organised by the Coventry Branch of British Computer Society (BCS).

Topic: Universities Challenge - Posters evening

Presenters: Postgraduate Research students from University of Warwick and Coventry University

Postgraduate students from both University of Warwick and Coventry University have presented a poster about research they are undertaking in an area of computer science. Attendees have been asked to vote on the best entries and a small prize has been presented for the best entry from each university.