Review of the BCI competition IV

• ¹Machine Learning Laboratory, Berlin Institute of Technology, Berlin, Germany
• ²Department of Brain and Cognitive Engineering, Korea University, Seoul, Korea
• ³Faculty of Biology, Bernstein Center Freiburg and University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany
• ⁴Institute of Medical Psychology and Behavioral Neurobiology, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany
• ⁵Ospedale San Camillo, Istituto di Ricovero e Cura a Carattere Scientifico, Venezia, Italy
• ⁶MEG-Center, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany
• ⁷Center of Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento, Trento, Italy
• ⁸Institute for Knowledge Discovery, Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria
• ⁹Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience, Institute for Neural Computation, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA
• ¹⁰École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland
• ¹¹Department of Bioengineering, Imperial College London, London, UK
• ¹²Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London, London, UK
• ¹³Physics, Neurobiology and Behavior, Medicine, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
• ¹⁴Institute for Neurophysiology and Pathophysiology, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany
• ¹⁵Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Little Rock, AR, USA
• ¹⁶Brain-Computer Interface R&D Program, Wadsworth Center, New York State Department of Health, Albany, NY, USA
• ¹⁷Department of Neurology, Albany Medical College, Albany, NY, USA
• ¹⁸Department of Neurological Surgery, School of Medicine, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, USA
• ¹⁹Department of Biomedical Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA
• ²⁰Department of Biomedical Sciences, School of Public Health, State University of New York, Albany, NY, USA
• ²¹Institute for Science and Technology Austria, Maria Gugging, Austria
• ²²Sobell Department of Movement Neuroscience and Movement Disorders, Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, UK
• ²³Neurotechnology Group, Berlin Institute of Technology, Berlin, Germany

The BCI competition IV stands in the tradition of prior BCI competitions that aim to provide high quality neuroscientific data for open access to the scientific community. As experienced already in prior competitions not only scientists from the narrow field of BCI compete, but scholars with a broad variety of backgrounds and nationalities. They include high specialists as well as students. The goals of all BCI competitions have always been to challenge with respect to novel paradigms and complex data. We report on the following challenges: (1) asynchronous data, (2) synthetic, (3) multi-class continuous data, (4) session-to-session transfer, (5) directionally modulated MEG, (6) finger movements recorded by ECoG. As after past competitions, our hope is that winning entries may enhance the analysis methods of future BCIs.