BRAIN
The ultimate hack
Armagan Amcalar
GDG DevFest Istanbul 2017
November 26th, 2017
Who am I?
Armagan Amcalar
Head of Software Engineering @ unu GmbH
Founder @ Lonca Works
dashersw dashersw
AUTHORED ON GITHUB
what is
the ultimate hack?
dashersw
The Summit 2013 - Picture by Dan Taylor / Heisenberg Media - www.heisenbergmedia.com
“I think we are about 8 to 10 years away from this being usable by people with no disability”
dashersw
Facebook VP of Engineering Regina Dugan F8 - Picture by Anthony Quintano
dashersw
dashersw
dashersw
dashersw
dashersw
dashersw
A PRIMER: The world's first EEG recording
... in 1924
dashersw
How it looks now
dashersw
Actually...
Let me show you.
dashersw
How does this black magic work?
100 billion neurons
Chemical reactions of K & Na exchange produce potential difference > "action potential"
Up to 256 electrodes for non-invasive methods
Thousands of electrodes for invasive operations
... and we still don't know how it exactly works.
dashersw
P300 — oddball paradigm
First published by E. Donchin and L.A. Farwell in 1988
2.3 letters / min
Based on randomly flashing letters in a matrix
Rare positive, common negative flashes pique interest
Action potentials fire 300ms after stimulation
dashersw
Separate Black from red
dashersw
Another demo
Berlin Hack & Tell
dashersw
dashersw
brain-bits
Available on GitHub: https://github.com/dashersw/brain-bits
Open-source P300 speller...
... that still needs some help!
dashersw
Tech stack
JavaScript all the way up
Native C add-ons for the headset
Node.js for processing
Electron as the wrapper
Vue.js for front-end
brain.js for neural networks
Custom BLDA in JS as another classifier
...and, MATLAB as the server for eig function.
dashersw
Formatting the data for Machine Learning
- Get raw electrode data
- Group by each second to get epochs
- Filter each epoc between 1-12Hz
- Winsorize data
- Zero-mean normalization
- Decimate by 8
- Apply machine learning
- Use brain.js for neural networks
- Use a custom algorithm for BLDA
dashersw
Let's look at the code.
dashersw
Conclusion
JavaScript is powerful enough to read and parse not only JSON APIs,
but also your brain’s API.
thank you!
Let's keep in touch!
Armagan Amcalar
