Connectionists: BCI Vacancies at UT-HMI

[Mannes Poel]

Five Research Positions on "Games and BCI" at HMI-Twente

At the Human Media Interaction (HMI) group of the University of Twente, 
Enschede, the Netherlands, positions are available for three Ph.D.s, a 
Postdoc and a junior researcher or programmer. Research will be done in 
the context of the Dutch national BrainGain project 
(www.nici.ru.nl/braingain/), a large-scale project that aims at applying 
recent developments in the area of analyzing and influencing brain 
activity for the improvement of quality of life and performance for both 
patients and healthy users. The emphasis of the research at HMI will be 
on BCI applications for the healthy users and it will focus on 
brain-computer interfacing and games. In this research the potential 
role of brain signals will be investigated in combination with other 
input modalities for games, including bio-signals and non-verbal means 
of communication. The research will be done in cooperation with TNO 
(Soesterberg), NICI (Nijmegen), F.C. Donders Center (Nijmegen) and 
Philips Research (Eindhoven).

The postdoc (3-4 years) and the junior researcher (2 years) will work on 
the topics mentioned below and they will support and advise the Ph.D. 
researchers. The three Ph.D. students will each focus on a particular issue.

Issue 1. What can brain signals tell us about the user experience? The 
focus here is on understanding the relation between experience, brain 
signals, and affective information obtained from other input modalities. 
Designing experiments and performing reliability studies are among the 
research approaches. The inferences about the cognitive and affective 
state of the user that can be made on the basis of the information from 
the various measures will be used in the development of adaptive 
interfaces for games.

Issue 2. How to measure and decode brain signals for control of game 
environments? Designing experiments and performing reliability studies 
are among the research approaches. The focus is on (machine learning) 
algorithms to extract information from brain signals in situations where 
a gamer has to perform various tasks in parallel. Results of this 
research will be used in the development of hybrid interfaces for games 
that allow control obtained from, among other things, brain signals.

Issue 3. How to design interfaces and engaging game environments for 
both patients and healthy users? These intelligent interfaces and 
environments know about the user's mental state and allow, among other 
things, multimodal commands to control the game environment and the game 
actors. This multimodality includes commands derived or supplemented 
from conscious mental activity. The focus is on game design, in 
particular the blending of a gamer's mental activities and the game 
intelligence, allowing the issuing of high-level commands that can be 
interpreted and executed by the game environment. Human-computer 
interaction issues such as usability and experience measures are also 
part of this research.

The HMI Department of the University of Twente comprises more than forty 
researchers (including 20 Ph.D. students). It is involved in many 
European and national projects and Networks of Excellence on smart 
surroundings, ambient intelligence, multimodal interaction, speech and 
natural language processing, multimedia retrieval, embodied agents, 
virtual reality, adaptive user interfaces and affective computing, games 
and entertainment computing. The HMI department is also responsible for 
the Master of Science track "Human Media Interaction" with more than 
fifty students.

Gross Ph.D. salary starts with € 1.956, - per month in the first year 
and increases to € 2.734, - in the fourth year of employment. Salary of 
postdoc and junior researchers depends on expertise and experience. More 
information is available on request.

Please send applications (with CV) or requests for more information by 
email to Prof.dr. Anton Nijholt (anijholt at cs.utwente.nl).