Brain-computer interfaces, neuromuscular interfaces, and other biosensing techniques can eliminate the need for physical controllers. In the context of interaction design, “control” is the process of transforming intention in the mind into action taken in the world (or machine). When freed from the familiar bonds of the keyboard, mouse, game controller, and touch screen, we’re faced with a clean slate and an epic design challenge. What happens when we decouple the user interface from hand-held hardware? We’ll discuss this and the emerging field of neural interaction design.
Andrew Mao is an interactions scientist at CTRL-labs, where he works on combining machine learning and HCI to build neural interface technology. Previously, he was an assistant professor at Aarhus University, and worked in several Microsoft Research labs during a postdoc and internships. Before jumping from the ivory tower to work on neural interfaces, his research on experimental studies of collective behavior using Internet participants appeared in both interdisciplinary journals such as Nature Communications and CS conferences such as AAAI, EC, and HCOMP. He holds a PhD in computer science from Harvard University.