A River of Data

An announcement by Scott Makeig Arnaud Delorme EEGLABlist members, In response to the current Recovery Act call at the US National Institutes of Health, we will very soon (April 20) propose to enhance our ongoing NINDS-funded research and development project, “EEGLAB: Software for Analysis of Human Brain Dynamics” (2R01-NS047293-04) by further developing, continuing to maintain, and freely distributing for non-profit research use a sophisticated software environment (DataRiver) for recording, synchronizing, and performing real-time computation on concurrent EEG, behavioral, sensory, and/or other psychophysiological data, including a flexible software system for running complex, interactive, multi-modal, single- or multi-subject experiments. In partiular, the DataRiver environment will support the use of EEG as the only high-density brain imaging modality allowing mobile subjects to act, react, and interact in natural ways within normal 3-D environments. To this end, the DataRiver environment also allows simultaneous recording of portable high-density EEG and whole-body motion capture, as well as other behavioral indices (wearable eye tracking, audiovisual scene recording, etc.), a new experimental modality for which we propose the term Mobile Brain Imaging (MoBI). The DataRiver and its stimulus presentation software environment, already partially developed by us under other private and public funding, will be linked directly to our established EEGLAB software environment and our newly funded archival human electrophysiological data and tools resource (HeadIT) using the Biomedical Information Resource Network (BIRN) software framework (1RO1-MH084819-01; Makeig and Grethe, Co-PIs). When linked to the developed EEGLAB and HeadIT environments, and to EEGLAB plug-in packages now published by many research groups, the suite of software environments EEGLAB, HeadIT, and DataRiver will constitute a complete, freely available, and readily extensible software framework for developing and applying human electrophysiology as a functional brain imaging modality, thereby expanding the effects of EEGLAB to speed progress in electrophysiological research by enabling and encouraging new forms of EEG experimental design, data collection, and data analysis and meta-analysis. The above paragraph summarizes a proposal we are preparing on short notice for additional funding to develop EEGLAB. We ask that any of you inspired to do so, please send us email messages of support for our proposal c/o eeglab@sccn.ucsd.edu. To be of use, your messages need to be received by this Saturday, April 16. For strategic reasons, indications of support from US researchers will be of particular use -- though the proposed software will be made freely available to all.