Elon Musk, a CEO of Tesla Motors, recently announced that he founded a new startup company named NeuraLink, which aims to develop a brain-computer interface (BCI) technology to ‘read and write’ the human brain. Two weeks later, Mark Zuckerberg, a CEO of Facebook, revealed that Facebook has a team of 60 engineers working on building a brain-computer interface that will let us type with just our brain activities. The subtitle of the newspaper article introducing Facebook’s BCI project was “Race Begins!”. BCI is a technology to decode neural signals to control external devices, communicate with others, or estimate one’s mental states. Since Jacques Vidal proposed the basic concept of BCI in 1973, this interdisciplinary research field has been rapidly growing. The Computational NeuroEngineering Laboratory of Hanyang University has led the development of the BCI technology in Korea since 2008, when its first research article on BCI was published. In this talk, I will introd uce current research activities and future research plans of our laboratory, especially focusing on the applications of BCI and biosignal-based human-computer interface.

Chang-Hwan Im graduated from the School of Electrical Engineering of Seoul National University, Korea, in 1999. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the same university in 2001 and 2005, respectively. He worked as a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities from 2005 to 2006. From 2006 to 2011, he worked for the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Yonsei University, Korea, as an Assistant/Associate Professor. Since 2011, he has been working for the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Hanyang University, Korea, as an Associate Professor. His research interests cover various fields of computational neuroengineering, especially brain-computer interfaces, biosignal-based human-computer interface, computer-aided diagnosis of brain diseases, and noninvasive brain stimulation. He has authored more than 120 articles in peer-reviewed international journals. He is currently a Director of the Computational Neuroengineering Laboratory of Hanyang University.