Congratulations to our CSNE Summer students!

Last week marked the end of an intensive 10 week summer research program for three of our summer students.  Alex and Magena were participants in the CSNE Research Experience for Undergraduates, and Matt was a participant in the CSNE Research Experience for Veterans.  All three did a fantastic job of delivering a short presentation and then presenting posters.  Thanks for all of your hard work this summer and good luck!

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Neural Security in the news

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When VICE Motherboard visited us last month to talk about surgical hacking, they also took some time to learn about the lab’s work on neural security and brain hacking.  Several articles are now available:

VICE Motherboard: How Hackers Could Get Inside Your Head With ‘Brain Malware’

Daily Mail UK: Hackers could get inside your BRAIN: Experts warn of growing threat from monitoring and controlling neural signals

Naked Security by Sophos: How hacking brainwaves could reveal our deeply guarded secrets

This research is by Tamara Bonaci, Katherine Pratt, and Howard Chizeck.

BRL research on telerobotic security featured on VICE Motherboard

UPDATE 7/27/2016

VICE Motherboard has posted several more articles following the YouTube video originally posted.  They are part of a larger series, The Hacks We Can’t See.

Why We Should Be a Little Paranoid About Hackers Messing With Robot Surgeons

The Internet of Things Will Turn Large-Scale Hacks into Real World Disasters

Original Post

Victoria Turk of VICE Motherboard interviewed BRL investigators Howard Chizeck, Blake Hannaford, and Tamara Bonaci on the security of teleoperated surgical robots. Tamara demonstrates to Victoria what it would feel like to operate the Raven II surgical robot while it’s under a denial of service attack. You can read VICE Motherboard’s article here, and you can read Tamara’s paper on the subject here.

 

BRL at NeuroFutures

katherine_poster copySeveral BRL members attended NeuroFutures 2016 at the Allen Institute here in Seattle to present posters.  Katherine Pratt (pictured right) presented work by herself and BRL alum Tamara Bonaci on the neural security of brain computer interfaces.  Other posters were:

  • System Identification for Deep Brain Stimulation Control of Parkinsonian Tremor
    • A. Haddock, Electrical Engineering Department and Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering at University of Washington; H. Chizeck, Electrical Engineering Department and Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering at University of Washington
  • Closed-Loop Algorithms and Chronic Brain-Computer Interfacing Using a Deep Brain Stimulator with Electrocorticography
    • M. Thompson, University of Washington; J. Herron, Dept. of Electrical Engineering, University of Washington & Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering; T. Brown, Dept. of Philosophy, University of Washington & Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering; J. Ojemann, Dept. of Neurological Surgery, University of Washington Medical Center & Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering; A. Ko, Dept. of Neurological Surgery, University of Washington Medical Center & Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering; H. Chizeck, Dept. of Electrical Engineering, University of Washington, Dept. of Bioengineering, University of Washington & Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering
  • Controlling Our Brains — On the Implications of Brain Computer Interface-Triggered Deep Brain Stimulation for Essential Tremor
    • T. Brown, University of Washington Department of Philosophy; M. Thompson, Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Washington; J. Herron, Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Washington; A. Ko, Department of Neurological Surgery, University of Washington; H.J. Chizeck, Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Washington; S. Goering, Department of Philosophy, University of Washington

More information, including full abstracts of the posters mentioned above, as well as more information about the conference, can be found here.

 

Tamara Bonaci to receive UW CIAC Rising Star Award

tamara_croppedBRL PhD Candidate Tamara Bonaci will be receiving the UW’s Center for Information Assurance and Cybersecurity (CIAC) Rising Star Award on Thursday, May 28th. The CIAC is recognizing her contributions for medical device security of both teleoperated surgical systems and brain-computer interfaces. Congratulations Tamara! Read more about the award and other honorees here-

Upcoming Publications and Conferences

Members of the BRL will be presenting a number of papers at upcoming conferences this spring. The final papers will be posted to this website after each of the respective conferences.

 

WeRobot 2015 http://www.werobot2015.org/, the fourth annual conference on Robotics, Law and policy, will be held in Seattle on April 10-11, 2015. This innovative conference includes formal (and informal) discussions of papers by experts from government, NGO’s, corporations and legal experts, as well as academics. Two of the papers to be addressed in this conference involve our lab:

I Did It My Way: On Law And Operator Signatures for Teleoperated Robots by Tamara Bonaci, Aaron Alva, Jeffrey Herron, Ryan Calo, Howard Jay Chizeck

Personal Responsibility in the Age of User-Controlled Neuroprosthetics by Patrick Moore, Timothy Brown, Jeffrey Herron, Margaret Thompson, Tamara Bonaci, Sara Goering, and Howard Chizeck.

 

The 2015 Cyberphysical Systems Week Conference  http://www.cpsweek.org/2015/  will be held in Seattle from April 14-16, 2014. This international conference (since 2008) now encompasses four ACM and IEEE conferences. Our lab’s contribution is:

Experimental Analysis of Denial-of-Service Attacks on Teleoperated Robotic Systems by Tamara Bonaci, Junjie Yan, Jeffrey Herron, Tadayoshi Kohno, Howard Jay Chizeck

 

The 2015 7th International IEEE/EMBS Conference on Neural Engineering http://neuro.embs.org/2015/  will be held in Montpellier, France from April 22-24. One of the papers at that conference will be:

Closed-Loop DBS with Movement Intention by Jeffrey Herron, Tim Denison, and Howard Jay Chizeck

 

The 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)  http://icra2015.org/  will be held in Seattle from May25-May 30, 2015.  From our lab, the following papers have been accepted:

Semi-autonomous Simulated Brain Tumor Ablation with RavenII Surgical Robot using Behavior Tree by Danying Hu, Yuanzheng Gong, Blake Hannaford, and Eric J. Seibel

Sensor-Aided Teleoperated Grasp of Transparent Objects by Kevin Huang, Liang-Ting Jiang, Joshua R. Smith, and Howard Jay Chizeck

 

 

BioRobotics Lab attends annual Society for Neuroscience Meeting in Washington DC

This last week members of the BioRobotics Lab traveled to Washington DC to present ongoing work in the areas of BCI privacy and security, BCI optimization, and closed-loop DBS at the annual Society for Neuroscience (SFN) meeting (http://www.sfn.org/). In addition to attending the main SFN conference, BRL researchers attended and discussed their research at several satellite conferences including the IEEE EMBS Brain Grand Challenges Conference and the 2014 INS Annual Meeting.

Read more

BRL attends Conference on Norbert Wiener in the 21st Century

wiener-norbertWe presented two papers at the 2014 IEEE Conference on Norbert Wiener in the 21st Century! The conference was a discussion about the father of cybernetics and his contributions to technology and society. The papers presented were:

T. Bonaci, J. Herron, C. Matlack, H. J. Chizeck, ‘Securing the Exocortex: A Twenty-First Century Cybernetics Challenge’, the Proceedings of the IEEE 2014 Conference on Norbert Wiener in the 21st Century, Boston, MA, June 2014

J. Herron and H. J. Chizeck. Prototype Closed-Loop Deep Brain Stimulation Systems Inspired by Norbert Wiener. In the Proceedings of the IEEE 2014 Conference on Norbert Wiener in the 21st Century, Boston, MA, June 2014.