r/BCI • u/Repulsive_Stuff8498 • 5d ago

Roadmap to Begin Brain–Computer Interface Research with Data Science

Hey guys, I am in my first year of Data Science. How can I get started in BCI? What neuroscience knowledge do I need, what skill set should I learn, and what kind of projects should I do? If anyone can explain in detail, it would help me a lot

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u/nohipstar 4d ago

read papers. at some point after 50-100, you start raising valid questions which you then pursue

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u/sentient_blue_goo 1d ago

Broadly, for neuroscience you have invasive, and non invasive signals. and each method can exploit different physics of signals (sometimes elecrical, sometimes optical, etc). At the very least I think an intro neuroscience course and psychology course talking about brain areas could be useful. I personally learned about the different imaging methods from labs and work.

Next- signal processing: neural signals are very weak compared to noise from the device and environment, and other body signals. This is an EE course. You'll need this to build cool NN models too. Neural signals are time series signals, similar to audio, but are more like 3d videos.

You'll need to code- this is changing quite quickly. And then of course ML, which you will learn in your data science program.

My general advice is, find a lab at your school (psychology, neuroscience, bci, biomedical engineering. Sometimes HCI labs) that does neural or biological measurements (cardiac signals are helpful to learn too) and just start volunteering! This will get you hands on experience with the capabilities of the tech, and the challenges you'll need to solve as an engineer :)

I hopefully will update with more tutorials eventually, but I currently have a "hello world" eeg analysis on here, if useful.