Classification Competition

[Michael Schroeder]

Dear collegues,

we are happy to announce december 13th 2004 as the start of the  

- BCI Competition III -

on classifying electrical brain signals in the context of
brain-computer interface (BCI) systems.

There are eight different data sets of five BCI groups (Albany,
Berlin, Graz, Martigny, T=FCbingen, see below). For each data set there
is one labeled part (training set) that can be used to calibrate
analysis systems and one part for which the labels are kept secret
(test set). The competition is evaluated on each data set separately
according to the competitors submissions for the test set. Deadline
for submissions is may 22nd 2005.

Compared to past BCI Competitions, there are new challenges addressed
here that are highly relevant to present BCI research:
 - session-to-session transfer,
 - small training sets, possibly solved by subject-to-subject transfer,
 - non-stationarity problems,
 - multi-class problems, and
 - classification of continuous EEG without trial structure.

Also this BCI Competition includes for the first time ECoG data and
one data set for which preprocessed features are provided for
competitors that like to focus on the classification task rather than
to dive into the depth of EEG analysis.

For each data set the competition winner gets a chance to publish the
algorithm in an article devoted to the competition that will appear in
IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering.

For more information please visit
  http://ida.first.fhg.de/projects/bci/competition_iii

The competition organizers,

  [Albany]    Gerwin Schalk, Dean Krusienski, Jonathan R. Wolpaw
  [Berlin]    Benjamin Blankertz, Guido Dornhege, Klaus-Robert Mueller
  [Graz]      Alois Schloegl, Bernhard Graimann, Gert Pfurtscheller
  [Martigny]  Jose del R. Millan
  [T=FCbingen]  Michael Schr=F6der, Thilo Hinterberger, Thomas Navin Lal,
              Guido Widman, Niels Birbaumer