year2016

.....for successfully upgrading to Mphil!

A film about work in our lab is part of the permanent exhibition in London Science Museum's new mathematics gallery.

.....for successfully upgrading to Mphil!

These are Mathilde's submissions to UCL's 'Research Image Art' competition

"Vegetal Electrodes":

"An Electrode bush in the moonlight":

See the Guardian clip
 ...and a description of what we actually did and found

Sijia's book ‘Guide to the Brain’ 《大脑使用指南》 is  published in mainland China.

Singer Laura Mvula visited the lab today as part of a project with the Guardian on "Music and Emotion". We recorded her EEG brain activity and pupilometry while she was listening to one of her favourite songs.

What will listening be like in 2030?

listeninginto2030 

Bidding farewell to Makoto Yoneya from NTT, Japan who spent two months in the lab this summer. He worked on a project which uses eye tracking to detect and quantify Auditory distraction.

Singer Billy Bragg visited the lab today as part of a project with the Guardian on "Music and Emotion". We recorded his EEG brain activity and pupilometry while he was listening to one of his favourite songs.

 .

Many thanks to Daniel, Ulrich, Sijia and Yinuo for helping host our two in2Science students, Sachar and Isabella, this year.  Here they are, hard at work:

.

(in the photo below are all the students the Ear Institute  hosted this year, and their supervisors)

 Our lab meeting this morning. Because #ScienceisGlobal

Delighted to announce that we were just awarded a 'Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council' (BBSRC) project grant to investigate "How the brain detects patterns in sound sequences".

A new 3 year Post Doc position will be advertized shortly.

Congratulations Dr. Lefkothea Andreou,  Dr. Nicolas Barascud and Dr Anahita Mehta.

Chait lab at the UCL Neuroscience Symposium:

Rosy's poster: "Is predictability Salient? - A study of attentional capture by acoustic patterns"

 Ed's poster: "Evidence for sensitivity to temporal predictability during auditory scene analysis"

  Sijia's poster: "Sensitivity to the statistics of rapid stochastic tone sequences"

27/05/2016 Queen Square Symposium

Yinou Zhou (poster presentation): "An investigation of listeners' capacity to categorize random sound patterns"

---

01/06/2016 NACS 20-th Anniversary Event, UMD, USA

Maria Chait (talk): "How the brain discovers patterns in sound sequences"

---

31/10/2016 2nd Workshop on Psycholinguistic Approaches to Speech Recognition in Adverse Conditions

Maria Chait (invited speaker): "Attentive sound tracking in adverse conditions"

Our work (lead by Kate Molloy and in collaboration with Nilli Lavie)  is featured on CBC Radio's 'Sunday Edition'

SONA is a unique data sonification project by Allison Rowe, Setareh Shamdani and Alexandre Kitching at the RCA and supported by interactions with our lab. See the final prototype video here

The 3rd Zhihu (major chinese blogging platform) 'Salt Club', held in Shanghai, on 14th May 2016.

Fifteen winners were selected,  based on their influence in their  topic/field (based on the total number of views and the quality of blogs in 2015).

Link here. And starring the  piercing gaze of our own Mathilde de Kerangal.

The EU's Horizon magazine report about the COCOHA project ('COgnitive COntrola of a Hearing Aid'). Our lab is partnering together with colleagues at ENS, DTU, and UZH to harness brain signals that can be used to 'steer' a new generation of hearing aids.

Maria and Mathilde are just back from a week-long visit to Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan. Maria represented the UCL faculty of brain sciences in discussions related to Tohoku University's new 'NeuroGlobal Graduate Programme'. Mathilde travelled with  a group of SenSyT students.

Visit to the TOMMO (Tohoku Medical Mega Bank Organization) space

(above) Mathilde presenting her poster.

(above) Visit to Hiromu Tanimoto's lab.

(above) Visiting the dept of ENT.

(two above) Visit to Avanced Acoustic Information Systems lab 

(above) Visual Cognition and Systems lab

Lunch

  Cutest MRI warning poster ever!

link here

Congratulations to Sijia for winning the 'pre upgrade' award at the UCL Faculty of Brain sciences PGR research symposium!

 (with the Dean of the Faculty of Brain Sciences, Alan Thompson)

A great time at the mid-winter meeting of ARO 2016, San Diego, USA.

Sohoglu E, Chait M (Poster) : "Temporal Predictability in Crowded Acoustic Scenes Modulates Early Stages of Perceptual Organization: Evidence from MEG"

Bates D, Chait M (Poster): "Attentive object tracking in busy dynamic scenes"

Zhao S, Pearce M, Dick, F and Chait M (Podium presentation): "Sensitivity to the Statistics of Rapid, Stochastic Sequences"

WANCM 2016 (Feb 2016)

Zhao S, Pearce M, Dick, F and Chait M (Poster): "Sensitivity to the Statistics of Rapid, Stochastic Sequences"

Auksztulewicz R,  Barascud B, Cooray G, Nobre AC, Chait M, Friston K (Poster): "Stimulus predictability dynamically modulates neural gain in the auditory processing stream"

ARO  2016 (Feb 2016)

Sohoglu E, Chait M (Poster) : "Temporal Predictability in Crowded Acoustic Scenes Modulates Early Stages of Perceptual Organization: Evidence from MEG"

Session Date: Monday, February 22, 2016; Session Title: Auditory Cortex: Human ; Session Time: 1:00 pm - 12:00 pm (the following day) 

Bates D, Chait M (Poster): "Attentive object tracking in busy dynamic scenes"

Session Date: Monday, February 22, 2016; Session Title: Auditory Cortex: Human; Session Time: 1:00 pm - 12:00 pm (the following day)

Zhao S, Pearce M, Dick, F and Chait M (Podium presentation): "Sensitivity to the Statistics of Rapid, Stochastic Sequences"

Session Date: Tuesday, February 23, 2016; Session Time: 8:00-8:15am ; Session Title: Auditory Cortex: Human Studies 

MEG-UK  2016 (March 2016)

Sohoglu E, Chait M (Talk) : "Temporal Predictability in Crowded Acoustic Scenes Modulates Early Stages of Perceptual Organization: Evidence from MEG"

CNS 2016 (April 2016)

Southwell R, Baumann A, Gal C, Barascud N, Friston K, and Chait M (Poster): "Attentional Capture by Acoustic Patterns"

Session Date: Sunday, April 3, 2016; Session Time: 5:00 – 7:00 pm 

2016 begins with a visit to our collaborators at NTT human communication labs, Atsugi Japan.  Here Hsin-I (NTT) and Sijia (UCL) are piloting an eye tracking experiment to investigate auditory perceptual salience.