Move aside, air guitars! Thanks to one of our latest projects, it is now possible to air-conduct music so that it actually changes in tempo and volume as you move your arms.
This so-called neuro:baton is just one of 12 cool projects being developed on our 2024 Summer Research Fellowship that’s firing up as we speak. Within the following two weeks, 20 high-schoolers will be designing and/or honing these experiments in small teams. Like last year, this Fellowship is happening in Belgrade, Serbia. Also like last year, it will result in a handful of brand new experiments—some to be published in our new book on the inner workings of our mind and consciousness!
Others will hopefully make it to reputable peer-reviewed journals. (Yes, we can’t get enough of high-schoolers publishing papers ever since we nailed it on our first try.)
The talented kids recruited from Belgrade’s high schools are being mentored by two tiers of support: four undergraduates from the University of Michigan who piloted some of these experiments, plus our resident scientists and engineers.
This is Sofia, one of the undergrad mentors and designer of the neuro:baton.
But making your arm muscles mightier than Herbert von Karajan’s isn’t the only thing our Fellows are working on. Other projects include:
a robotic keyboard that’s to be controlled by leg muscles,
Spiker-Man armband that flings web when you flex your fingers,
glasses that detect your eye blinks,
and more…
Say Hello to neuro:bit
You’ve guessed it by now: there’s a new gizmo in the Backyard Brains toolbox. It’s called neuro:bit, and it’s a tool that lets anyone easily build brain-machine interfaces (BMIs, also called BCIs or brain-computer interfaces). It interfaces with electrical signals from your body, and integrates with micro:bit, BBC’s award-winning educational microcomputer!
The only other thing you need is our standard orange cable with 2 recording electrodes and a ground.
We’re putting together a repository with product documentation and experiments, where the new experiments will be added too. Check it out here, and stay tuned for more BYB news!
Call for HS Teachers and Undergraduates in Biology, Engineering and the Arts:
Calling all AI and neuroscience nerds (AND nerd wannabes): We are back!
After taking a hiatus due to a global pandemic, we are proud to announce that we are returning with a very special guest star: TinyML! Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML) is a deep learning toolkit made for tinkers, educators and for those who want to know how machine learning really works… and we are excited about what it could mean to neuroscience educators!
For the first time ever, we are inviting K12 teachers to be a part of our summer program! Learn how to integrate Machine Learning into your project-based lessons and help provide feedback on our teaching tools and project curricula!
This summer, our fellowship program will focus on developing creative, wearable, and fun human-machine interfaces that can react with your brain waves, muscle, heart and eye movements using Deep Learning. You will learn the basics of neuroscience, computational thinking, machine learning, electronics, and will go from start to finish on developing your very own project. You will get support from our in house scientists and experts through every stage of your project.
Our AI Fellowship program will be designed around 2 cohorts. The first are undergraduates with a background in Neuroscience, Art, Electrical, Mechanical or Computer Engineering, where they learn how to develop their own innovations, conduct fun experiments around computational neuroscience. We are also recruiting High School teachers interested in learning about AI and how to teach hands-on AI lesson plans in their classroom. Teachers will participate remotely from around the country (1hr / week), and will help guide our projects for optimal use in the classroom.
This fellowship is focused on developing computational skills. To do so, you will learn how to read and write peer-reviewed papers, discuss and plan around ethical concerns of using AI, learn how to develop a project and collect data, how to analyze and test results, how to make your own scientific poster and present your work to the academic communities, and finally how to speak to the public about your work. This program is unique: instead of working on a small part of the bigger project… all fellow projects are yours alone! We will support and guide you through, but you will experience everything from inception to publication… much like the life of a graduate researcher. No prior research experience is necessary or required!
From left to right: Top: Greg Gage (Not a Fellow), Zachary, Jaimie, Spencer, Nathan, Ilya Bottom: Joud, Christy, Haley
It’s early on a warm Ann Arbor morning and the office is buzzing with excitement! Our Summer 2017 research fellows are here! Today, our fellows are getting to know the staff and space at Backyard Brains, but more importantly, they’re planning, because for the next ten weeks they will be working on neuroscience and engineering research projects. The projects include work with Squids, Songbirds, Dragonflies, Mosquitoes, EEG recordings, and Electric Fish. The fellows work to create inexpensive, DIY methodology (the BYB way) to tackle their research problems and then present their findings at a poster presentation and in a journal publication. The fellows also develop experimental-grade versions of their projects so that other students and teachers can perform the experiments themselves!
Meet the Fellows, See the Projects
The fellows are off to a great start! Check out their blog posts introducing their projects:
After a morning of introductions and orientation, we took a quick break for lunch, then hurried back to the office to perform some recordings. For many of our fellows, working with our SpikerBoxes was their first opportunity to perform real neuron recordings! This is just the beginning of a summer of hands on science, rapid prototyping, troubleshooting, and data collection.
Quick Italian Buffet for Lunch
Recording from Earthworm neurons. Spikes!
As part of the fellowship, the students will be keeping you updated with frequent blog posts. These posts are a great window in the world of research! From start to finish, you can follow along with our fellows as they experience the triumphs and pitfalls of scientific inquiry.
You’ll be hearing a lot about our fellows and their projects for the next ten weeks. They’re excited to introduce themselves and their projects to you soon. Keep an eye out here, on our Facebook page, and Twitter for project updates and more!
