Doron Friedman

Ori Tal, Doron Friedman

P300-based spellers are one of the main methods for EEG-based brain-computer interface, and the detection of the P300 target event with high accuracy is an important prerequisite. The rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) protocol is of high interest because it can be used by patients who have lost control over their eyes. In this study we wish to explore the suitability of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) as a machine learning method for identifying the P300 signal in RSVP data. We systematically compare RNN with alternative methods such as linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and convolutional neural network (CNN). Our results indicate that LDA performs as well as the neural network models or better on single subject data, but a network combining CNN and RNN has advantages when transferring learning among subejcts, and is significantly more resilient to temporal noise than other methods.

Doron Friedman

While the possibility of time travel in physics is still debated, the explosive growth of virtual-reality simulations opens up new possibilities to rigorously explore such time travel and its consequences in the digital domain. Here we provide a computational model of time travel and a computer program that allows exploring digital time travel. In order to explain our method we formalize a simplified version of the famous grandfather paradox, show how the system can allow the participant to go back in time, try to kill their ancestors before they were born, and experience the consequences. The system has even come up with scenarios that can be considered consistent "solutions" of the grandfather paradox. We discuss the conditions for digital time travel, which indicate that it has a large number of practical applications.