 So welcome fellow hackers, scientists, artists, philosophers, and free thinkers. I'm very glad you had time, you came to this place, you joined us in this session, found this space time and I invite you to tune your synaptic pathways and let us show you the latest in human and machine interaction with the example of brain-computer interfaces, open-source brain-computer interfaces. So these are systems where you connect your mind directly to a machine and we all know this from sci-fi movies or literature, but now it's possible with electrodes to put it on your head basically and with today's simple technology called EEG in our simple case because at home you cannot have like a big fMRI machine, we use EEG and this technology is well known in medical and psychology areas for 80 years just what now is possible to make it miniaturized like what I'm currently wearing it's a wireless neuro headset, it has active tri-electrodes on the forehead where they think the consciousness is vibrating and now it's feasible it used to be possible a long time, the hippies did it and the military did it and measuring the brain waves, the electroencephalogram but now it's possible to miniaturize it and for example simply I was going to check the brain waves while I'm talking and send them via Wi-Fi on another beamer and so this is a new area because now everybody can do it, it's no longer necessary to have a big lab and an expensive machine, we are introducing with this talk the brain-duino it's a device which you can build for a little less than 100 dollars and it's a low-noise, high-quality brain-wave amplifier that sends you basically a Bluetooth or Wi-Fi signal that you can open with any programming language and because of this new technology now this comes possible for basically everyone who wants to do it to use this technology and that's why we put so much energy into having open source technology available and a low-entry barrier so I tried to for you find the world's best experts in this topic I myself have come to this chaos congress 15 years ago and was introduced to some new ways of thinking and since then basically worked on this project and then traveled the world to find other people who know about this and so I'm Dr. Metamind Evolutionist, stage name it's a meta-mind evolution so it's the meta-level you think about something from outside of the system and look at the system like meta-communication talking about how we communicate basically looking at the mind from the meta-perspective and giving this to everybody and so the evolution of the meta-mind is this project name and then the first person who came to me who wanted to work together was NeuroFox and then also Masahiro Karata I met him in San Francisco, he worked on it before I was born he worked on it for 30 or 40 years he will tell you later about the history and basically I believe these people on stage here in the world of open source, in the world of hacking outside of military, outside of medical places are the world's best team here for you to now introduce you to this technology so first I'm going to give you a small overview and maybe some motivation what you can do with this technology then Konrad Willi Düring, I like to call him NeuroFox will tell you about also the mind hacking aspects and the science aspects and then as I like to call him Professor Karata because he's the old wise guy he will actually tell you about the hardware about the brain doing how it works, the amplifier and what I even like more is because he has been there since the beginning he knows what it was like he built the first brainwave amplifier before there were any digital computers so he actually connected an amplifier to an oscilloscope and looked at these brainwaves on an oscilloscope screen and when the first personal commuter was available he did it so basically he has a lot of experience and I think it's very interesting to share the early perspective when it was not well known this technology and basically the early days of brainwave technology but you can look forward to their parts as well so just a quick overview what we are basically doing with those neuro headsets that we call them now is measuring the brain activity and it comes from those clusters of neurons we have like millions of it and they generate electromagnetic fields which eventually result in small charges small voltage differences on the scalp to appear and we pick this up with silver electrodes and amplify it 25,000 times and then send it over Bluetooth and so it's mostly large scale dynamics mostly large scale dynamics so we cannot pick up individual thoughts or individual neurons just collectives like maybe 50,000 neurons when they're firing together then we get a smaller spike so basically it's very abstract zoomed out thing we cannot detect any individual brains with this technology in the military they can actually put an antenna to your head from distance and see the shapes what are you visualizing currently if you're dreaming somebody can put an antenna to your head and see in black and white the shape outline of the person you see but not with the EEG with EEG we get the event rated potentials and general oscillatory processes collectively so if they are neurons collectively firing so it's more like the background general operating mode of the brain left and right brain so are you sleeping, dreaming highly focused, relaxed that's what we can detect and we can categorize at the individual electrodes but also how they relate to each other so the general different things used to be categorized in different frequencies delta, theta, alpha waves what is really interesting now with this new technology because there's always so much noise if you have any noise in your environment even high frequency you get harmonics and they make your signal clip we are picking up individual neurons so it's biggest challenge is all this noise reducing the noise beyond 50 hertz because of the power noise of the transformers everywhere but now we can measure up to 200 hertz so it used to be unknown to science the gamma and lambda waves and they are for exotic states but I guess this is basics of course it's different which area of the brain you put the electrodes if you want to control things you put them on the motor cortex where your whole body is mapped so then it's possible to imagine you have a fist with your left hand and now in this area there will be a signal coming and on the right side as well and they have done this with chimpanzees doing joysticks and getting sugar water and eventually the chimpanzee stops using a joystick he just imagines doing a movement and that's how you can do then you would put it to the motor cortex but we are mostly interested for artistic purpose and meditation the frontal cortex, the youngest area of the brain with these patterns that arise there so then the motivation why is this interesting of course you have the medical use if you have depression, autism, HDD I like to say our system simply harmonizes the brain activity, different electrodes it rewards you when you have more synchronicity in the brain complex mathematical formulas, coherence things but whenever your brain is more synchronous it rewards you so I think it basically heals any I used to have most people have in their brain waves some gaps and basically this can unlock all your brain to vibrate in all kinds of frequencies and to vibrate more synchronously and as the first thing of course you can improve different brain waves where you are locked into something like depression when you cannot get out of a mental state you can use the newer feedback, the life visualization of your brain to reward you whenever you go into a direction that is out of this state and so I believe some papers say you can cure autism, HDD, depression but basically it goes beyond that you can do self-improvement you can reprogram mental patterns because of the real-time thing, you look at your brain oscillating on the screen, you hear the sound in real-time then you can start playing around with things and you notice how it changes it's like surfing through your own mind and thereby you can adjust things eventually people after five minutes when you try our system which is possible later you can come to the neuro village MindTaker's launch and try this by yourself after a few minutes you can simply use this new muscle in your mind the Vedic people call it chakras or whatever you have stuff in your mind you can do and if you have the real-time thing individual empowerment and enhanced interactive society because people interact differently I guess you can read it yourself art music games are very interesting I really like the neurofeedback meditation thing because you can change your consciousness you can say I want 12 hertz in the right brain seven in the left that's the whole thing with the open source there will be the pharmacy industry there will be Microsoft's Google everybody people will be coming and say you wear those neuro headsets and will improve your mind you can fly through virtual reality but they will kind of tell you use our close product and we have done the research we are experts and just look at the screen and your mind will improve but I say to you decide for yourself what frequencies and what brain activity you want to increase in your mind and that's why I recommend using open source software and you can simply say okay today I want to try maybe 50 hertz in my right brain or 42 hertz in the left brain and the visual cortex should be at this 7% and then just try this you can decide for yourself what brain wave activity you want to amplify in your brain instead of getting whatever other people think your brain should be like and this freedom that's basically what we fight for so definitely there are dark sides to it the mind hacking there is mind hacking going on all the time in the media and the brainwashing but with this it's really crazy it's actually possible there are companies like emotive more and more young people wear those neuro headsets not self built like this one but commercial plastic devices they wear them for extended time and they do world of warcraft they do casual gaming and wear them all the time and it's possible to hack into those windows machines and change the openGL driver and for example display for a short amount of time certain numbers and a symbol for example a symbol of a cash machine just for a few milliseconds while they're playing a game and then display certain numbers and there's something in the brain p300 event correlated potential that basically checks all the time oh I recognize this or make sense or I have seen this before it's always going true and false whenever you get a stimuli and basically you can start data mining the brain while somebody is playing a game they're completely unaware you show them certain symbols hidden in the game or just for individual frames and then certain numbers and their brain will react and say yeah that's the first pin that's the second pin, that's my password and you try brute forcing different numbers and the brain will tell you yeah that's the password that's my bank account and if some of people of you were wearing a brain interface now I could actually do this while I do the presentation insert some small information in this and then at the end pick out people and say your birth date your pin number, your password it's enough to make you aware of this and so that's really scary when they don't know they wear those headsets and somebody is actually data mining your brain and picking out information remotely if somebody is in front of you they can hypnotize you but remotely in a massive scale for example you do World of Warcraft the new plug-in or Facebook the new plug-in and they upload it sounds nice but in all those quantified self-apps you actually need three times to press cancel to disable the auto backup function so there's an app for checking your pulse for checking your breath and you need to disable three times to press cancel so it's not back-upping your data basically sending your heartbeat and your brain waves to their server and you can do certain machine learning things and it becomes possible on a massive scale to surveil the dreams and minds and then to decide like in America in some prisons if you want to get out early they check your brain waves and they say you have unusual brain waves you cannot go out your brain waves are normal okay go out in society and this danger should be aware of for example they can also do the calibration thing like data mining is subconscious the neural marketing some people like to call it so they show you advertisements, they show you pictures and they check how your brain reacts so what you can do is see for example the excitement, attention and mental openness someone is currently experiencing so example you see on this person at 5am whenever they are in the game at this point their mind is very open or they are very excited and then you show them the advertisement and basically that's like brainwashing so much more powerful and then you should watch out for this so that's why we later will propose an open source firewall for brain interfaces for intrusion detection to basically check if somebody is mining your brain and then block their IP at least this the firewall is quite tricky you cannot simply check say the band pass filter you don't allow the 20 hertz brain waves it's more complex you have complex patterns to make a classifier for brain waves non-trivial project once you have the classifier we can do something like netfilter or IP tables, have brain tables but before this classifier is available we can do intrusion detection for example if this p300 happens unusually often while you are flying around in space in the game the system could check why is there so much p300 going to or forth somebody might be data mining your brain block the connection for some time I recommend installing those applications if you do neurogaming because people can do this also they can induce sensory hallucinations they can make a screen flickering when your brain is aligned to this and then this will be more effective emotional manipulation the event correlated perception filter adjustment basically it's brainwashing and big marketing companies maybe you know this guy they are going to do it which is fine but then if we have open source alternatives I think it can be useful that's the thing with the firewall you do the event correlated potentials dynamic time fingerprints you know if there is like somebody pot scanning pot scanning you you can see okay there are different pots checked in a certain time interval maybe randomized or not if that happens in your brain somebody is mining the event correlated potentials they will be red flags later the data abstraction signal feature encapsulation filtering and then yeah I want to invite you to think about this what would be a consumer BCI freedom manifesto so what are safety guidelines what we should be aware of when we construct this technology for example some of you might be joining Google, Mac, Apple or Facebook and actually program those systems in the future that you know do those brain interfaces and then maybe you can think about those issues what are the personal rights the cognitive personal rights you know the Gedanken sind frei those things are maybe important maybe you know it should be preserved this individual right that nobody enters your mind and maybe there should be an on and off switch on every device that has this that actually physically allows you to switch it on and off those things personal home use safety if it used in a medical context what is important let's collectively think about this and define this as a safety thing so how does it actually look like just how does it actually work basically silver electrodes, noise filtering amplifiers, operation amplifiers analog digital conversion then a microcontroller then the blue two thing it's basically like a sound card you know high quality sound card for low frequencies so it's very linear so the hardware side is kind of it's more like a sound card for low frequencies and that's how one visualization can look like you have the left and right brain you have all kinds of indicators for relaxation focus and so on and what you can do eventually the medical people that usually look at the raw signal but then at least for transformation certain machine learning stuff can be interesting and especially in machine learning will be a big topic you can do all kinds of if you have many electrodes or if you have multiple people, ideally I'd give out 20 headsets to you now and say try this and we would be machine learning or rewarding ourselves if their brainwaves are similar different machine learning things you can do important I think is that with most machine learning algorithms it makes sense to first do some kind of feature extraction don't feed the raw brainwave signal into the machine learning first do a feature extraction for example check what is the alpha what is the magnitude of an alpha spike or try to abstract it into some features for example there was an alpha spike true and false or how much percentage of alpha was it and that's how a framework could look like to process those brainwaves and now I guess I give over to NeuroFox who will tell you more about how it works in detail I'm glad that you are here thank you very much I give the microphone to you can I have the presentation okay alright hello everybody so I guess already the time is a little bit running so I just try to focus on the most important aspects so I want to talk about exploiting braincomput interfaces which sounds maybe a little bit like I'm in the rush because I think it will take at least maybe 10 years or let's say in the next decade we will have more braincomputer interfaces in mainstream so I still think it's important to now think about it and that's why I think it makes sense that this Congress to speak about it and so as a meantime I already did a lot of introduction to this topic maybe I just want to focus on the methods where I did some research and so basically of course there's new applications with a new technology coming up and we have the first neuro gaming conference in San Francisco this year I think this is quite amazing and very much applications actually but those ones are proposed methods which sort of concern the security and privacy of the user actually so one of the most striking one is the neuro marketing I think it can also be misused if we find ways actually to look how somebody thinks about certain commercial and if this data somehow leaks out I don't know if it's a good idea then there has been a lot of talk a lot of people coming up about EEG based biometrics and it's actually rising the last years you can see that by the number of applications and quite striking I think and it's also just as a security measure fused with other kinds of biometrics biometrics again it's like I guess everybody else here like fingerprints for instance but the same with brainwave data actually and so and also EEG based pin generator I would just scoop up a little bit okay so the methods so to say I think the most striking ones I've found so far was actually gathering some information about your health condition I think this is quite well not to say shocking I'd say but somehow could be strange and then also there was this publication maybe some of you read it came out in 2012 the site channel attacks and the use with a consumer BCI emotive and where they said they would lower the entropy of the information by almost 40% and in order to for instance find out a little bit or find out the pin code or locations and normal people and then what I say is also possibly to some extent there might be identity theft possible I'd say this maybe because it depends of course on the system how sophisticated it is but let's say for the less sophisticated systems would be definitely possible and so the first thing about health actually you're getting information about your health basically there's this there's like for instance normative databases which is quite popular and in medical scope and you do lots of e.g. recordings with a lot of people and you can sort them by age gender and then you also have for instance healthy people and then you have some sort of for instance neurological disorders and you're able to make an estimation compare the user's brainwave with this database and say okay so he's must be somewhere in the 30s maybe and has this kind of disorder and okay maybe will not take him for this job something like that for instance I mean you okay so then the knowledge this is what I already said about this is again the P300 Metamind already talked about it just very quick I guess yeah so it's a attention driven reaction to that you see or something that you hear interesting thing the stimulus there it doesn't matter which kind of stimulus but we have targets and non targets that's how we divide and for instance you see a lot of some users sees a lot of pictures of people and she doesn't know them at all but at some point there's somebody who knows and we have the P300 for instance that is because it's striking to him he knows this guy and what is he doing in this collection of pictures for instance and so this is basically what Martino which and his colleagues did from the University of Oxford and UC Berkeley and Geneva so they had some kind of calibration and what they did then as I said they could simplify the way to achieve private information and I found this quite striking I mean it's lab situation and so everything is perfect but imagine also of course with the advance of machine learning algorithms you could somehow make it more easy actually to get there and do it even on consumer devices so I mean that was also his point and then so the last thing I'd just make a quick time's running out is biometrics as I said already it's like there's a lot of research right now going on there and different approaches to this and as I said I made this differentiation between so to say I wouldn't say primitive but more easy approaches where you just take certain frequency ranges or find out the individual alpha peak and they claim for instance this very old publication but it's still going on that they claim that they have very high accuracy rates here and other ones so also based on the P300 where you see they show you certain animations or pictures and then just measure what's going on how the reaction really looks and so then the simple method I think it's quite possible if you gather some data from some user and you just look at some frequency range for instance of course in resting state or if he doesn't do anything or he has that's usually what you do if you want to do some quantified statistics for instance or and then I think there's a way actually to generate this from the samples you get the more advanced one is I guess well it involves a lot of machine learning and you would have maybe some inspiration from modeling and you try to actually model some cognitive processes for instance something with saliency, something you see on the display and then you would simulate actually the P300 I think it's a lot of work but I think it can be done actually to some extent not completely of course we're not half the way there with brain simulation also but okay so just over you again the three techniques and of course I will also be there the Neurovillage or sea base also talk about this in detail and so I will skip this part this is just I'm showing you the ranges of attack that are possible at which point you actually would put some malware or some bad software I think there are different ways possible and this is the most sophisticated audience for think about creative ways to attack here so I think it's okay if I leave you with that and so then I will just run through this this is the device that came out and I will just put this slide online okay alright I think it's okay I'll just take it so and then I will just skip this and then yeah so this is the call for precipitation part actually where just yeah actually gather people for think about actually neuro security just I guess I don't know if it's a new phrase I just put it like that because as I said I think maybe it sounds a little bit early but I still think it's possible it should be considered at this point already because a lot of things are working on the cloud and with your brainwave data and yeah then okay maybe should just go to I'm sorry thanks to the Mac let's hear what Professor Carter says about this and switch this machine if it's possible that's the Mac connection line hello it's okay so thank you for coming and like to show our brain doing this one so currently I'm connecting our brain interface from here then shows like this way so this is my low data left brain and right brainwave then translate to the spectral model like this way and more directly into the microphone and then control this animation currently so I like to just like to show how I develop yeah okay so I start to use analog amplifier before CPU start in 1972 and when starting microcomputer I was so exciting to can do so many things with the microprocessing so I designed like this way I'm pretty complicated so a lot of assembly programming at the time and then like Apple too is pretty nice can use basic whatever but otherwise so difficult to programming that time then 1983-1984 Lisa and Macintosh starting so using object Pascal and Aida and C using Unix system also so I with a special experience so to draw in some image using a brainwave so this is the beginning of the brain-computer interface for my experience this is a diagram for how I control mouse with the brainwave it's just I like to show it's idea it's not really cannot see anything it's some pattern recognition function included for how we can switch mouse with a brainwave so these are actually drawing of it using a brainwave that time yeah so so I designed a 12 channel 12 bit brainwave visualization in 1985 so yeah thank you so that time no machine existing like that way so only like pen recording on the paper so maybe go like MC like side words okay yeah so that time was so big and so expensive anyway so I designed for the brainwave interface at that time then I started 23 years ago for brain interface for Makin Doshi so this is a brochure at that time and this is a device so it is many experiences with many people so so the left and right so yeah this is just current application looks like left and right brain yeah okay so it shows left brain here and right brain we have here it shows over time then then we can we can get which frequency is dominant how much power we have from left brain or right brain and this information we can translate to the like this numbers and we can in this case we transmit UDP same as an animation application sound application can get this information so this is a real time currently to control this animation actually okay so we can we can do so many interesting stuff like this way hello so basically the ideas you have left and right brain and you analyze the different patterns and you analyze the frequencies and from then you generate various animations the ideas you have the conscious display you can see certain frequencies that's for your conscious part your brain sees this frequency is active but if you want to do a neurofeedback it also makes sense to have subconscious displays where you don't really know what's going on but your brain in your subconscious will notice and maybe this reflecting object changes diameter whenever I'm thinking of someone I like or whenever I'm thinking of my internal state it's rotating so that's why first you don't really know what's going on but it's very important to have a clear scientific thing for your consciousness some people like to see the clear frequencies but some people react more to this in fact eventually after five minutes they realize oh that's me they realize seeing yourself that's what's important for neurofeedback basically why he has those interesting animations now we can take some questions okay thank you metamined evolution for your very interesting talk so for questions I would like to call the internet questions first please yeah we have three questions actually one from white rabbit quiet please if you're leaving please be quiet when you're leaving white rabbit is asking how long in terms of battery life can a wireless do-it-yourself setup last does a setup with one or ten electrodes consume much more power it's 0.2 ampere per channel and basically a standard lithium ion smartphone battery will last you five to eight hours but it depends also it's 0.0 to ampere or current per channel so the more channels you have indeed the amplifier needs more power but you can with two channels you can do eight hours and do-it-yourself means you can stick as many batteries to the headset as you want you know for example this headset is the latest MK3 prototype you put smaller lithium batteries all around the thing and I can get to multiple days with two channels so do it yourself whatever you like if you like more channels put more batteries on it but it's quite power efficient okay we have enough time for one more question I will take a question from the internet again everybody who's in the house and has questions feel free to contact the speakers afterwards thank you FBGA Light asks what is the bandwidth within the brain in comparison to the bandwidth that you get out of your signal well I mean the electrodes pick up you know zoom out it depends on the number of electrodes but we can do 24 bit 1000k sample rate but bandwidth depends on the amounts of electrodes you have and that's basically it the more electrodes you have the more bandwidth and the sample rate is usually enough to have an increased frequency double of your highest frequency you want to measure so and with Bluetooth you get to some limitations but with wifi and a new spark core for example you can have eventually hundreds of channels there's no limitation it's only what technology transmission wireless transmission is possible with the vortex encoding once your head is full with electrodes it's still going to work okay one more question maybe or maybe not we unfortunately have to hear the roof of the next talk thank you come down to join us give another round of applause to our speakers please