uh so I get started yeah cool so hi
everyone my name is a sitting swing
timing I'm with neuro tech x melanie was
supposed to be here as well today but
unfortunately she had to stay back in
montreal neuropsych x were a
not-for-profit organization which is
essentially about community building and
promotion around neuro technology and
specifically the thing that I'm very
much interested in is an accessible
neural technology so some of the things
that we like to do is we like to network
we like to teach we like to build
different types of open source projects
so we have a relatively active github
and we just want to kind of grow
together we have different chapters
across the world so we have about 18
chapters worldwide most of them in north
america and europe but if you are ever
in any of these locations you know feel
free to look us up and get connected
with your local community so the world
weren't gonna start the talk is just the
kind of we can we mentioned what neurol
technology as as i was talking at their
booth downstairs at the biohacking boo
what came across is that some of some
people they have different
interpretations as to what neural
technology represents and so you can
kind of see from the screen here
assuming that kind of the classical ones
that you think about what its or so when
you're thinking about neural technology
so on the top left you have an MRI
machine on the top right you have a tDCS
transcranial direct current stimulation
coincidentally this is also a tDCS and
so we're actually you have these T&CS
badges at the biohacking village and if
i press this little button right here
i'm actually creating phosphines
artificial light in my eyes so the
current is running across the optic
nerve and it's clean this artificial
like to be present in front of me you
have things like EG or electronics or
paragraph ii which is essentially at
voltmeter for your brain and then you
know things like TMS transcranial
magnetic stimulation which is a big
magnet to induce your neurons to fire
off i also like to do stupid things like
don't have the video play I'm tell us
what
be happy here is so I have a few RFID
and I've seen implants as well so here's
where the implants to be able to get
into work so what you're supposed to be
seeing here is being able to access oh
there you go okay I just click on it so
I'm just kind of showing what the door
is locked put my hand over it and now
you can get magic and I have another one
as well over here which is an MSD
implant and I just do this more for
party tricks just because people are
still common pressed by this but yeah so
there you go reason why I'm here to talk
today is about brain based
authentication I'm assuming most of you
are familiar with what a biometric is
and what biometric authentication is
essentially it's just using some form of
bio signal to be able to do this as an
identifier I could be things like
physical traits you know like your blood
vessels your facial features or your
fingerprint or it could be more
behavioral like the way that you walk or
the way that you type usually think
about biometric and there are seven
factors that you should be considering
run selecting one essentially thinking
about universality so does the target
population that you want to identify
have it is it something that's unique
for each individual is it something that
remains permanent with those individuals
is it something that you can measure how
well can you does it perform as a
biometric so can you do it in a very
robust fashion there is something that
people are going to accepting we use as
a biometric and the more important one
is it something that can easily assume
that or faker kind of just circumvented
so the realm of brain biometrics has
been growing in popularity in the past
five years or so with about 100
publications been released there's this
really active guy in early that's been
raining
so i'll give you have been interested in
some of his research it became more the
popular thing in 2012 as there was a
plant that was done as part of the human
connecting project which was working at
MRI scans based on different types of
pests and see if they can use that as a
method of identification so from the
picture here you can see that I one has
a point 99 level of identification
that's just means resting state so
looking at the recipe essentially just a
person standing still and not doing
anything for two minutes but you don't
need an MRI to do brain based
authentication we could actually do with
much cheaper technology in the past 10
to 15 years there's been kind of a
revolution within the realm of oil
technology where it was you know
primarily seen in complex like this
before you know very much in a research
setting and you know you have these
massive wires that becoming obvious EEG
cap but nearly enough form factors in
class and designs that are relatively
cheap cheap as when your phone is about
a hundred bucks us if you make it
yourself you can potentially get a
cheaper but that depends on where you
get your parts but you're usually
looking between let's say two hundred
six or seven hundred dollars the only
thing that you couldn't have to
understand before going into the how you
can use the brain into the
authentication school it's how do you
build an interface with a bang in the
first place so many people those fears
for the throne brain computer interface
raise our hands alright so both of
people rather than about I said I'll
gonna be one detail about this
essentially what a DCI is it follows
this kind of elegant so at some point of
technology is interfacing into the ring
and then eventually kind of creates this
feedback loop which they can influence
of an activity so that will change it
for the future classification of that
mental state so first it starts off with
you generation of the daily activity
then you have to acquire that signals
from the brain you have to digitize it
you have to get the features of the
signal that you're acquiring you have to
build a classifier take that class apart
and then put that into a feedback device
so we're talking about brain activity
essentially when we're talking with
activity they're all interested in
looking at which is what EGS essentially
you can capture the activity with an EEG
when there's enough neurons to fire in
the automatic sense and collectively
they're generally just smell amount of
electronegativity the humane types of
brain activity that you're looking for
event-related potentials and our fourth
hypothesis and there are solutions no
oscillations are essentially rhythmic
patterns of reactivity that naturally
occur within the brain so Elaine
intuitive quite often is brain waves
this is essentially what a neural
oscillation is so you kind of see two
examples of one what kind of like the
raw EG activity would look like when
you're awake versus when you're asleep
we could kind of see there's no
difference between you two here's me
being on kind of like more of a live
example here so I close my eyes and I
don't know how easy it is to see but you
can kind of see it as a change in the
activity that's being produced the other
one is event-related potentials
essentially the way to think about ERP
is when you presented a stimuli usually
between maybe 100 to 7 30 milliseconds
later you're going to see a change in
potential value would occur within the
brain okay so for example on the bottom
right graph or so actually the video
here what this is is a p3 of the
dispeller so the individual is looking
on a specific letter and it's one the
letter finally flashes it's going to
create 8300 response so flashing like
the courage 300 milliseconds later
there's a potential positive potential
change other crews and on the bottom
right they Tennessee how you kind of
call them so p100 positive potential
change at the 10 seconds so the graph is
inverted y value is in first so it's all
positive values below the x-axis but
that's the basic idea this is kind of
like another way that you can kind of
visualize it so eventually going to see
let's wrap the peaks that you saw there
there was this on the red line there's
just very big peak of activity occurred
out of North once so now that you
couldn't understand how you acquire
brain activity or what they look like
you know not to require the signal so
the technology that is most commonly
used as a junior electroencephalography
you can think of it as a voltmeter for
being so it's just measuring the changes
electrical activity will occur naturally
so this is a research greet a great EG
that will be put on the person right now
when it comes to you usually think yeah
if you look at the top right the main
components that you're working with with
mooji if you have the electrodes the
elections they connect to an amplifier
and they use something analog to digital
conversion so there's different types of
our lectures i can use as pardon me
either work with wet or pass dry
electrodes right electrodes require you
to put some form of conductive paste
between your head and the electrode
itself losing weight avoid ears because
you get a much better quality signal but
the obvious downside is that you get
pasted over here let's our electrodes
it's a little bit easier she used in a
day-to-day basis except the quality of
the signal tends to be much worse if you
either do passive or active electrodes
passive electrodes we should've gotten
stuff but our positive electrode is
essentially just a conductive material
that runs through a wire which will then
connected amplifier on the board itself
so the beauty of this is of this type of
design is that it's much easier to work
with multiple electrodes and it's
cheaper per lecture however you can also
have an active i lecture where you have
the amplifier directly attached the
election itself however this comes at a
much bigger cost and it's more difficult
to put multiple them in in the on your
head at the same time so once you kind
of understand how these electrodes work
you there's a standard method that you
use in terms of actually placing them on
your head called the international
control system and essentially it's just
taking you know the difference between
here and here here and here and
measuring ten or twenty percent
respectively so on the left ear I took
an overhead picture of my friend and I
just kind of overlaid what it would look
like on him so once you have the
electrodes placed and you're starting to
get signal in you have to do a little
pre processing so preprocessor just
essential needs that you're getting this
raw signal and you want to remove any
form of artifacts you want to make sure
that you know you have a bandpass filter
so you're knocking all frequencies of
activity you just want to make it a
little bit more easy to work with that
signal once you have done that this is
where you would get that feature
extraction involved so since it's way
too complex and the signal is very well
you have to start to do something
mathematical operations on it to
actually get some features that you can
actually work with so here's another
document showing so these are different
frequencies of brain activity and you'll
see in a second here how they kind of
all merge into this kind of like raw EEG
activity right so this is what kind of
looks like regularly but it can
decompose it from there you will be able
to build your classifier so you know
there's different ways you can do it
there's 1,000,000 your method so you
work with weirdest criminologists
support vector machines there are
networks gaussian classifiers which was
something we both specifically for BCI's
or you could take normally new
approaches as well and this is where
into the feedback mechanism and this is
what you tend to see most times when you
search for DCI those videos like this so
my last day that is a brain-controlled
joan and this was a competition that was
the university of florida where they had
students race against each other by just
controlling don't grow across and trying
the competitors and right here this is
an open vci so it's an open source EEG
that's connected to an opening
prosthetic and so he's actually not
using EEG activity here is actually
using his jaw clenched but he's using it
to open close the hand so that's the
basics of what a DC is well now that you
kind of understand that what you need
and then understand is how can you take
the system and actually build a form of
authentication with it so I talked a
little bit about your keys and
oscillations and it can actually use
these two different types of brain
activities
build a method of authentication so one
well-known study using an ERP asked for
individuals to stare at a bunch of
different pictures and they were looking
for a specific picture so say that say
they were shown you know 20 pictures in
a row and eventually they would see the
picture that was there's this target
picture would be their ID so it would be
looking at the brain response that
occurred when it saw the target picture
they're generally I would I believe be
300 response and using the type of
system you can actually get an accuracy
about ninety seven point six percent and
there's another designs that kind of
mimic this that have been just good the
one did I more interested in is in
resting state just because it requires a
lot less set up and all you really have
to do is just thankful for two moves
with that EG on your head so you
essentially would be looking at the
different brain waves and how they kind
of fit together and depending on where
you place your lecturers you can get
different levels of accuracy as to
pediculus discipline dividual so from
the grass here if you look at the 01
appeals as in the ultimate ation which
is placing electrodes back here you can
use that brain activity as a person is
still for two minutes and you can
collect enough samples where you can
accurately predict who they are at a
non-gay percent accuracy I think that
potentially why this is possible is
because there's evidence with alpha beta
rhythms that they carry individual
traits which are being claimed to be
genetically induced so there is a
generic that goes into it and just kind
of like in a smile a side point if you
are think you're doing this make sure
you're always looking at the new
activity below 40 Hertz so the next
question you may be having is should i
be using this to protect your stuff at
home or work and the short answer is no
this is an absolutely terrible method of
doing identification or any form of
control in your house and i totally
advise you not to do it at this point
the more longer answer is if you go back
to our seven factors you can kind of see
a picture that's coming out so if you
look at the universality
it depends on the type of brain activity
that you're looking at so for example if
there's a type of an activity called
motor imagery which is the idea of
imagining yourself doing some form of
motion with either like your right hand
or your left and are your feet and
thirty percent of people can't actually
generate that type of activity so if you
use that as a method of identification
you know it's not going to work really
well uniqueness this still has to I
think he studied a little bit more
because we're still very much at the
early stage and we don't know how much
overlap there is between one person to
another permanence this is also very
tricky thing because EEG readings can be
the most trickiest thing in the world to
do because so many different factors
will influence your brain activity from
one day to another so say for example
you get a concussion you know you're
screwed you can't use that same method
of authentication because your brain is
just completely messed up even if you're
just really tired you know it will
completely mess with the signal so you
know if you have some someone coming
here in the morning and they have to
investigate and they spoke the whole
night you know working in some pain it's
just what I can work very low
measurability this is another thing that
it really it really suffers so I really
depends on the type of headset and it
will environment where it's being
recorded so you have to be conscious of
that performance it's not one of these
technologies that are very robust and
there still has to be a lot of work done
to improve this an acceptability you
know this might be also a little bit
tricky as well because you need to have
the appropriate form factor so because
the fact that if you're asking a person
put 56 a lecture was on their head and
put a bunch of paste in their hair you
know and you have to do that something
like a regular basis it just makes no
sense right however sir convention I
think this is where EG tends to have its
biggest ring because it's a dynamic bio
signal it means that say for example one
system becomes compromised so say for
example you're looking at resting state
you can essentially switch to an ERP and
you could still use it ring as a form of
a specification which i think is really
awesome you can even test if you have a
live signal coming in by doing like a
random s SVP which stands for
steady-state visual evoked potentials
essentially if you flash a light at a
specific frequency that generates a
strong enough response in the brain that
is easily acquired by
EG so this is a good way to kind of see
if you're getting a live signal or not
however it's still not perfect and
because you know a lot of the consumer
great EGS that are out there they're IOT
devices you can essentially do a
man-in-the-middle attack and you know
you're you're fucked so you know there's
many people would have looked at EE jeez
and try to do matter little pecks and
because when people are building
biotechnology that are actually thinking
about security you know it's not going
to be very very difficult to do this so
said why would you come all the way from
what y'all to tell us not to do this and
people by am your salvation ok I'm here
to save you from yourself just because I
don't want you to do it it doesn't mean
that the Scrooge McDuck over here it's
not going to try and sell you on
something so the one thing that I've
come across on quite often with the
amount of technology every so often
you'll see a really really shitty
Kickstarter or and its really really
shitty IndieGoGo that is trying to sell
you some full of new technology advice
but there's absolutely nothing of value
and this is my favorite so this is there
so they're essentially what they're
doing is they're doing this magnetic
coil that they place on the back here
and it's supposed to change your brain
activity based off of the frequency of
the magnetic anyway thousand dollars of
sales on in the go don't like the most
1696 backers of this which is
mind-boggling and just to kind of show
you how stupid this is they're saying
that you can get enough energy from your
garden audiojack to actually connect to
the back of the head where it's actually
influence your day actually no it
doesn't work that way the other
important thing that I very that becomes
very obvious with a lot of these
Kickstarter's is that you know people
are building them or you know they
really should not be building a jeez so
this product is called the super brain
it was once again this is her story this
whole idea of doing like feedback but it
was like no it made no sense what they
were trying to claim and if you look at
their team a bunch of those years but
not a single neuro scientist so they
probably got like their own consumer ed
at one point or they
oh wow look we can do this amazing thing
and but they really understand to bring
at all so what I kind of see with all
these products is essentially becoming
21st century snake oil and so what I
want you guys to be aware you know
before you go if they someone comes and
tries to sell you in a biometric and EEG
biometric or a baby's implications will
you really have to make sure you ask
yourself your personal questions however
I'm not saying I can't you can
definitely make it if you want I think
it's really cool now I'm trying to do
something with a complication just by
you know usually but before you do these
things you need to consider and we can
use this advice as well as if you ever
get approached by someone that wants to
sell you on something do different
multiple choice of authentication if you
are really working with eg so even
something as simple as like you know
with like Android devices you know we
can kind of do like a pattern of but
they also require you to have a pin as
well just in case it doesn't you forget
your your pattern of activity so you
know have difficulties of identification
just because you don't know how well EG
as a biometrical working or long-term
also a lot more steel testing has to
occur it works really well potentially
in a controlled environment but if
you're going on in the field you're not
going to get very good results the other
thing you have to consider is it's not
going to work with populations that
don't want to do it so if you do this
with the prison population or a captured
population whatever on they can just
essentially not do the past that are
being told to do and it just completely
messes it up the other thing you have to
consider want to consider related to my
own technology or no science is that
innovation has to be very very slow in
the field so you know if you're waiting
for it to come you may have to win in a
while um so this is dr. G who knows he's
based out of the neutron neurological
institute in Montreal and he has been
pushing for open where science to the
past for a while now and this kind of
shows to you where we stand within the
realm of neuroscience we're just at the
point right now where they're creating
open data bases around
and and it's very very difficult it took
a long time just to get to this point
the other thing is to consider is that
if you're doing form of experiments you
know if you're doing in the research
context you know there's a lot of things
that stop you from being able to get
started right away and working with
research-grade EG doesn't have a very
high cost associated with it and he also
has always have to go through optical
approvals and if you kind of get
something particular that's not very
well understood you may not get good
results just because the fact that
basically context the other thing we
have to consider in any don't do
anything the pcr design is that there's
a lot of factors that going to doing it
well so this is some of the things that
you have to be considering when
designing any form of ege system so you
got to make sure you have a good night
signal-to-noise ratio you gotta be sure
that it's thinking they can work
comfortably and I'm going to make sure
that it's secure it's safe that the cost
is relatively low but it's fashionable i
guess if that matters but there's a lot
of things that you really have to
consider and the kind of like give you
an idea of like what you should be
thinking of it in terms of laser cost
you know functionality tends to draw
quite a lot versus usability right so
some of the consumer grade ii geez you
know they look very nice and they're
relatively cheap but you can't really do
much with them the other thing you
really understand is that you need to
have a good experimental design or a
good experimental protocol and this is
something that has messed me over so
many times just because I didn't take
the time to acquire their baby EG
activity properly so reach out to people
that are doing their studies in
neuroscience they're very very nice and
most of them will like the fact that
someone wants to talk to them but so
going talking never cut corners realize
that neuroscience research does take a
lot of time to do it properly the give
you use case of where i miss tuppence so
we did one child with the authentication
where we working with known versus
unknown acronyms so based off of the erp
response that would be generated by a
brain based off of you know an acronym
versus you do it
create an end 400 response however we
cut a lot of corners because we were
running short on time and what happened
is that we only got about 10 minutes of
data when we actually needed closer to
45 controlled everything else we were
working with research great easy that
device that the person's brain is a bios
setting which is like a
hundred-thousand-dollar machine and
we're in this massive Faraday cage so
there was no kind of like electrical
electrical interference but it still
failed so how do you make your room well
there is enough parts out there right
now that it makes it relatively easy to
start to try and make your own you can
either go down the free option there's
more and more databases of EEG
activities that are out there that you
could potentially look at the short
Center for computational neuroscience
which is based out of San Diego they
have a list of eg databases that exist
and you could take a look at some of
those there's some resting state data in
there and you could try and build a
classifier with that and you can either
use our cave you know side fire and the
new which is uh I mean either really
really great tool will for easy and the
mag data as well if you're interested in
looking at some of the papers i would
recommend taking a look at picture
patricia kime pc research he's probably
the most active researcher looming so
this is what your system will kind of
look like it you actually so this is
more of a live system so if you actually
do want to kind of a choir on hardware
and do this yourself these are the
different components that you're going
to work with so in the top left there
under signal acquisition that's an open
DCI so you just need a G you're going to
need a cap just the place the electrodes
you can do something as simple as like
what I'm wearing right now which is just
like a standard had that me keep them
replaced but you just got to make sure
that there's good contact and then you
can use something like psycho pi which
is a python library to do EG experiments
with you also for a future extraction
already mention a few of them you can
work with them and we can work with
psych it if you do want to work with
matlab you can work with EG lab but
at the kitchen open source and you girls
take a look at opened by which is kind
of more this drag-and-drop interface to
do EG work with it's a pretty cool
system and down to a feedback you know
you can either with the cycle hire so
some of the hardware that is available
for you you can either try to do
something with a no scar there's one
paper that i saw they were working with
the single electrode so this is a singer
electro system and they were able to get
a relatively good result a more popular
option is working with the emotive so
the emotive is a 14 channel easy but it
tends to be a little bit more expensive
and the thing that I don't necessarily
like is that they make you pay forty
nine dollars a month to do 50 session so
this is really targeting researchers and
they've really pivoted on tomorrow
because very much the beginning they
were drugging you know consumers but now
you know they realize that the money's
not there you also go with the news the
news is a relatively simple EEG it's
just elections that you place over your
forehead I haven't we tried to do it
with lessons people you might get some
interesting results but the more popular
one is the open bc i when it comes to
makers so it's a look so easy we could
either get four or eight electrodes and
they also provide the building materials
and the schematics with it if you ever
want to spoil it yourself and you can bc
is also pretty good awesome something
because of the fact that it's been shown
to work on different types of e art p
responses so someone has built the p300
speller with an erp sorry with open bc i
and they got relatively good with us
there's also a few papers I've been
published recently that assume that the
belt that consumer grade EG is just as
good maybe a little bit worse as
research grade EEG this is going to be
your cost that you have to think about
so if you're working with an eight
channel open bc i'll be about 500 us
four channels 200 if you include all the
parts if you're not what I like showed
the console will be a little bit more
put your work will try it'll cost you
about two hundred seventy bucks so with
that if you are interested in building
your own or if you want to have more
open discussions in domain i invite you
to number one
check out our github at North I
github.com / ameritech X and we have a
few projects there that might be
interesting for you the awesome DCI is
this non exhaustive list of EG resources
or more technology resources that you
can learn a little bit more about that
we're currently working on narrow tech
ed year which is neither open education
platform to actually teach you all this
stuff and you can also take a look at
the front lines github a puzzle box i
know he creates open source EG tools our
toys rather but if you do want to join
us on the Norfolk actually ever
relatively active slack group and the
guys join the EG biometric account any
questions all right questions when i
recommend the concussion no no just just
delete the data that's a difficult
question but i would say i would say
there's a few things that have to
improve so the robustness of these
systems is definitely one of those
things that really have to be figured
out i think that is the machine learning
gets a lot better within the domain it
will speed up the process of making
these systems a little bit more robust
and as more material sciences looked
into and so on so forth and may improve
it i would say i don't know i'll be
making up a number but i'll just say
five years yeah with the baseball cap
that introduces other issues so you'd
have to make sure the electrodes are
placed properly you it's still the same
issues right you still have to require a
lot of data from a specific individual
and with the baseball cap the issue is
the safe it moves you won't be able to
see that it moves right so like most of
the designs of EEG cats actually allow
for you see where the election took
place just to make sure that it's being
done properly but with a cap it's just
not visible the back room so the
question is if someone with ms or
Alzheimer's could have been sakata
actually i think that would go against
the authentication it probably would
just create a lot more problems and
value but i can't say what the hundred
percent certainty question the back like
what so i mean i can generate thought
phosphine so i can introduce like a fake
light just using keys yet hallucinations
I guess no not really I mean I've done
I've used them used as a meditation
school and but it's not really causing
me to be it's not causing me to
hallucinate it's just giving me a method
to determine how well I'm meditating
actually I think it's kind of oxymoronic
if you think of a real feedback
meditation tool because if you're always
kind of like thinking about the fact
that how well you're doing while you're
meditating you're not actually
meditating so wisdom use device what I
tend to do as I turn off any live
feedback I just kind of get my score at
the end so the answer is no no no all
right thank you very much