Mind-Reading and Telepathy for Beginners and Intermediates

To what extent can a machine know the inner workings of a person's mind, even theoretically? This course explores this question through a mixture of hands-on machine learning and critical discussions on theory. In this course, students will practice ML techniques on a provided corpus of data to produce a working brain-computer interface. Simultaneously, students will engage critically with recent research in ubiquitous sensing technologies, and the discourse around them, tracing ideas to their origins in cognitive science.

This half-semester course runs for the first eight weeks of the semester (8/23/17 - 10/17/17).

Each week will cover one topic in mind-reading machines. Tuesday classes will be a lecture, a survey of the week's readings, centering around one or two particular papers. Thursday classes will be lab-time, centered around supporting assignments, projects and hands-on engagement with the course dataset.

This class is a pre-requisite for Info 290T. Projects on Mind-Reading Machines, an (optional) 1-unit course taking place in the second half of the semester, which would continue the themes of this course through a student-led research project.