Where is TOBI positioned inside EU projects?

On TOBI's it is mentioned that the project is part of BNCI FP7 cluster. A further inspection into what this means exactly directs us to CORDIS, the European Commission's primary public repository and portal to disseminate information on all EU-funded research projects and their results in the broadest sense.
Here, one can see the current researches funded by EU such as Horizon 2020 or the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).  The latter of these ones puts together all research-related EU initiatives and shares the same purpose as all other European groups mentioned in the previous post: European prosperity, growth, competitiveness and strengthen the technological base of European industry. The program has a total budget of over 50 billions EUR, with a substantial growth in this area, compared to his predecessor FP6 ( almost 50% according to their website). According to the presentation slides of FP7 these funds were distributed as shown in the picture below:

As you can see there are various areas where research projects exist (prices are in million EUR).

TOBI is positioned in Subprogramme ICT-2007.7.2 ( Information and Communication Technologies) and its purpose is to develop practical technology for brain-computer interaction. Under contract type we can see written "Collaborative project (generic)". This already give us an idea about the type of organization, contouring the idea of a consortium. In future posts we will have a closer look at the participants on this project and the way they are organized. At this point other interesting aspect related to the project is the total budget which accordingly to their website is close to 12 million EUR, of which the EU contribution is close to 9 million. The project ran between November 2008 - January 2013 and now it is marked as completed.

At the beginning of this post it has been mentioned that the project is part of BNCI cluster. This acronym stands for brain/neuronal communication interface. Other projects that are part of this cluster and that involve some of the TOBI partners are:

• DECODER
• BETTER
• BRAINABLE
• Future BNCI
• MINDWALKER
• MUNDUS 

There are also other projects in the BNCI cluster that have less or no connection to TOBI. A full list of projects in BNCI FP7 can be found here.

Standardization in EU and European Commission projects

"Standardisation is a voluntary cooperation for the development of technical specifications based on consensus among stakeholders. Standards play an essential role in areas such as interoperability, privacy and accessibility thereby supporting market acceptance and the efficient and effective use of applications and services." 

 quote from European Commission's website

In my previous post I have mention that TOBI is a European project. Continuing that idea I will try to present to you an overview of what is the role of European Union (EU) in some of the standards and what areas of technology have European projects.

The idea behind the standardization processes of European Union is more or less based on the same foundations as Schumann Declaration in 1950, Single European Act in 1986 or  Maastricht Treaty in 1992: the prosperity of Europe. The prosperity is based on the creation of an internal market and different technical rules, regulations and standards in the member states create a barrier to trade and hamper the progress to a general internal market. In order to break this barrier the standardization is necessary. This process can be further extended to an international level in the future.

The European Commission (EC)  is the driving force of European Union, the executive body. You can look at it as being the engine of EU, being responsible for proposing legislation, implementing decisions, upholding the Union's treaties and day-to-day running of the Union. EC provides funds for a vast number of European projects from different domains that are meant to improve the lives of citizens.

There are three officially recognized European standards bodies:  the European Committee for Standardization (CEN), the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (CENELEC) and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). Together, these three non-profit organizations form the European system for technical standardization. Even though they work closely with the European Commission they are not EU institutions.  Usually, the full members of these organizations are the standardization bodies of all the EU member states. However, states and organization from all over the globe can be associates.

The way the standardization bodies cooperate with EC is through mandates. The Commission sends a requests to them, asking to develop an European standard that provides solution with a legal provision. This results in an harmonised standard, after an open, transparent and consensus process. The products that comply with the European standards are marked with the Keymark, a certification mark owned by CEN and CENELEC. Below you can see a list of domains  in which harmonised standards were elaborated.

As it is mentioned on CENELEC's website there can be a huge number of stakeholders in the European Standardization and they may vary, depending on the project, such as: industry and commerce, service providers, public authorities and regulators, academia and research centers, trade associations, consumers, small and medium enterprises and other public and private institutions.

The Vienna Agreement is an act signed between the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and CEN that aims to avoid duplication and conflicts between European and International standards. All three European standardization bodies closely cooperate with ISO and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in order to achieve the goal they call 'one standard, one test, accepted everywhere'.

In future posts we will focus more on the project TOBI and the standards that came out of it.



You can find more about European Standards at these addresses and books:

• The European Standardization Regulatory Framework, by W. Hesser and A. Czaya.
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Committee_for_Standardization
• http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/policies/european-standards/index_en.htm
• https://www.cen.eu/
• http://www.cencenelec.eu/

Why brain-computer interface?

MindMeetsMachine - this was the first idea for this blog's title, but because human minds are much more similar than we expect someone already thought of it before. But the idea remains the same and this sums up exactly what brain-compute interface (shortened BCI) is: a connection point for human mind and machines.

Why is that important?
From my  point of view that is very important and will affect us all in the future. Maybe it is not too visible right now, but if you look at the way technology evolves every year you will realize it is closer than you thought. What got me thinking more and more about the area of brain-computer interfaces was one article a colleague of mine shared on a social network. It was a research project from University of Washington called "Direct Brain-2-Brain Communication in Humans: A Pilot Study", that had as an objective the transmission of information directly from one brain to another. The result of the pilot study showed that it is possible to perform brain-to-brain communication, one of the researcher being able to move a finger of the other one. Even though there were a lot of speculation afterwards regarding the correctness of the study, it made me think about the possible consequences of such a study. What happens if it falls in the wrong hands? How can we control it? You may think that it is highly unlikely since you will have to have those helmets and all the wires, but you have to consider that this is only the beginning and with devices such as smartphones or even Google Glass you will always have something close to your head. Hacking such devices proved to be possible in the past so a reason for concern it is justifiable.

However, we should not ignore so many positive aspects of the brain computer interfaces and the fact that they can actually save lives in the medical area. In future posts I will talk about different kind of applications using BCI, but mostly about the effort of standardization in this field.

TOBI  is one of the most important projects in the area of BCI standardization. TOBI group is an European Uninon research projects and among its partners we can find a significant number of European Universities and clinical academies. Their goal was to produce a standard for interoperability between BCI and acquisition equipment, between BCIs themselves or BCIs and applications as well as producing different protocols for network communications and standardize the syntax and semantics of commands used for these protocols.

Hope I  made you think about the importance of BCI and you will follow my future posts to find out more about the TOBI standard.

References:

•  brain2brain: http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~rao/brain2brain/experiment.html
• TOBI project: http://www.tobi-project.org/