Note: The project has since been changed to political orientation prediction
Our project is to develop an EEG based Brain Control Interface for a Windows machine. This is meant to be used by people with motor disabilities, who cannot move their hands and fingers and hence can not use a computer. With our platform, disabled people would be able to control their computer using their minds. By giving the power of computers, our platform will open the door for numerous opportunities, from making documents to surfing the web, this will unlock a world of potential. In order to complete this project, our project uses several core academic concepts.
Several courses have driven our decision to pursue this senior design project. My college curriculum experience has given me the chance to take courses that offer application-based experiences inside the classroom. Some courses that stand out are CS 4033 Artificial Intelligence, CS 5173 Deep Learing, CS 2021 Python Programming and CS 5168 Parallel Programming. Python Programming was the base and stepping stone for my knowledge in machine learning and artificial intelligence. In Artificial Intelligence, I was exposed to interesting and powerful concepts in computer programming, such as CSP and MinMax Algorithms. Deep learning introduced me to the powerful concept of neural nets. Mainly CNN, RNN and Reinforcement Learning. We would be requiring the knowledge of this to effectively filter out noise from the EEG signals. And since we are working with live time series data stream, we would require some sort of scale up and speed up in processing, this is where the parallel programming course would be really helpful.
My co-op experiences have been diverse with different employers. My first was with Hendrickson International. The technical skills I picked up on this co-op included Natural Language Processing and programming with Python. I had a wonderful experience in working on a project which I designed, developed and deployed from scratch to the end. I built a scraper tool in Python to scrape useful data from engineering documents and extracted keyword phrases using spaCy and Natural Language Toolkit to build a json search index. On top of this, I built a POC client-side search engine using lunrJS with a user-friendly UI, which uses the json search index produced by the python scraper tool to quickly and efficiently access engineering files. This reduced the data retrieval time from minutes to milliseconds. Working at Hendrickson also helped me grow as a responsible developer. As the client base was mechanical engineers. I had to make sure not use too many technical jargon and Computer science concepts in my presentations. This helped me grow my communication skills mainly on delivering technical ideas and concepts to a non-technical audience. Later, I joined Infinera Corporation, I was responsible for big data analytics on Library files used by ASIC Design engineers in their projects. I built an ETL tool to efficiently extract data from these big data files using multiprocessing and Analyzed the data and discovered ways to improve ASIC design Successfully, I reduced data retrieval time from hours to minutes, Improved Power attribute by 15%. Also, I learned some important non-technical skills such as project management and software engineering through proper documentation. With the senior design project, I expect to use many of the skills I picked up while on co-op, including software engineering, machine learning, parallel processing, big data analysis and project management. There are various technical and non-technical needs for our senior project, so I expect that my project management, design, and programming skills will come into play.
I’m excited to participate in this senior project for two core reasons. Firstly, it is a technical challenge that requires us as a group to use our collective experiences in a variety of different disciplines within computing. The field of Brain Computer Interfacing, is a burgeoning one with an immense potential to radically change the world and our future. I am lucky enough to do a project based on this and be one of the pioneers. Secondly, this project can provide a meaningful impact and experience for the people that are our users of the project: people with motor disabilities. Our project is a platform that is free and open for people to get access to computers. By doing so, this would unlock a world of potential to people with disabilities, being able to control the computer with just their minds will give them the power of internet and computing. The education area opens up the potential for our senior project to make an impact on disabilities inclusion and possibly propel people with disabilities to have a better life and achieve more.
In designing a solution, our project has three core components: a wearable EEG headset, ACAT (Assistive Context-Aware Toolkit), a windows machine. Our expected result is for people with motor disabilities to engage and learn using our platform. Once all components of our design have been fully implemented + integrated and a demo is ready for use by disabled people, we will know that our project is nearing completion. By having people with disabilities interact with our software, we can take their feedback to create an even better platform. We will know whether or not we have done a good job based on the reactions and feedback from our users.