BCI: Standards & Horses' Arses
The word “standard” is almost the definition of unexciting. In most megacorporations, employees who “meet standards” are given perfunctory cost-of-living adjustments and sent back to their cubicles. No one looks for the standard strength analgesic when their head is throbbing. Standards are boring. Standards are also essential for modern life.
Standards often feel arbitrary, and in some cases, they are. However, the modern world relies on the ubiquity of standards and our belief that they will endure. Without them, civilizations would crumble.
In the world of brain-computer interfaces (BCI), academia and industry are just beginning to assemble the infrastructure upon which the future of neural data and neurotechnology will develop. You probably aren’t paying much attention. There’s a good reason why—standards are boring (have I mentioned that?). Still, standards are crucial, and often, generate impacts spanning centuries. As it turns out, standards in modern life are still intertwined with the dimensions of an ancient Roman horse’s arse.
Boring Standards
Consider the humble traffic light—you may recognize them from captchas, since remote work continues to decrease our contact with the objects themselves. Is there any defensible reason why red must mean “stop” and green must mean “go?” We could easily imagine any number of alternate schema, and yet, it seems vitally important that every motorist and pedestrian masters and accepts this structure. If the Albanians spontaneously decree that the patterns should be inverted (e.g. green = “stop” and red = “go”), the first Greek to drive across the border will meet a steel-twisting fate (as will some unfortunate Albanian, most likely). The possibility of such scenarios is why the United Nations hosted (and 69 state parties signed) the Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals in 1968. I suspect the discourse was boring in a way only accountants and bureaucrats could imagine, but it has, undoubtedly, saved lives.
Some standards have far lengthier histories.
No one gives much thought to the US standard railroad gauge, but if the distance between the rails were different in Pennsylvania and Ohio, I suspect there would be some rusty graveyard of steel-filled rail cars sitting somewhere due east of Youngstown.
But rest-assured, no such mishaps will occur because of the width of a horse’s arse in ancient Rome. Seriously.
When the imperial Romans first built long-distance roads, they were designed for their legions. Their war chariots left ruts. Future users of these Roman roads either built wagons with the same widths between wheels, or risked damage. Folks who built pre-railway tramways used wagon-making jigs and tools (which still incorporated the same spacing). The first railway lines followed those tramways. As the shuttle program took flight in the 1980s, schlepping booster rockets from factories to launch pads by train was constrained by the 4-foot, 8.5-inch gauge from ancient Rome, which had more to do with the width of a horse’s arse than space flight.1
If you enjoy using the internet (and with content like this, how could you not?), you’re a beneficiary of HTTP, a standard used in the transfer of information through clicks on links across the world wide web.
If you enjoy next-day deliveries from Amazon Prime, you owe a debt of gratitude to Malcolm McClean, who discovered how much easier it is to move goods between and across continents once we standardize the size of shipping containers.
No one thinks much about traffic lights, railroad gauges, HTTP, or shipping containers. But modernity requires such standardization.
BCI & Community
The next frontier of scientific research lies not in understanding the patterns of goods circulating the globe, but rather, electrical activity circulating the brain. Neural data are currently the purview of cutting-edge academic research rather than industrial-age ubiquity. But as microtechnology becomes an increasingly common treatment of injury and disease, the same need for standardization applies.
Standards are community phenomena. Even when an individual e.g. Tim Berners-Lee’s HTTP or Malcolm McClean’s shipping containers creates a standard, their benefit is only realized when a community adopts them. In the landscape of BCI, AE hopes to contribute to, rather than own a standard (think Linux, rather than Microsoft).
We hope to enable researchers. As a longtermist company, we recognize that standards will evolve, and more importantly, will require support in the way of software to read and recognize standards, to validate files, and to convert among multiple standards.2 As a company positioned athwart cutting-edge research and industrial best practices for data science software development, we feel well-positioned to shepherd this process.
What We’ve Done
Creation of standards means some upfront legwork, with or without supportive equines. To that end, we have developed the NDX-NIRS extension to Neurodata Without Borders for fNIRS data, the NWB data standard.3 NWB has accepted our extension, and we didn’t even need to host a convention in Vienna..
We have also contributed to the development of another fNIRS file format, in this case, the Shared Near Infrared Spectroscopy Format (SNIRF).4 Developed in concert with other researchers and hardware manufacturers, we continue to contribute to the maintenance of the standard to this day.
Finally, we have co-developed an extension to the brain imaging data structure (BIDS) for fNIRS.5 For the non-data scientists (and congratulations on reading this far), the word “metadata” probably has not caused you any nightmares or other psychological trauma. However, data science projects often become money and time-sucking quagmires due to a lack of data about the data. How are the variables defined? How are these data formatted? How should they be interpreted? Where, when, and by whom were they gathered? Rob and Luca Polloni, in concert with other fNIRS researchers, are looking to formalize how metadata is stored.
What’s Next
You probably didn’t read the preceding section with rapt attention. At best, you consumed this like you would that salad you ordered instead of the burger you wanted or that lecture you endured because the course was required. You also might see the technological landscape shift in the next decades because of such mundane standardization. Those suffering from traumatic brain injuries might regain agency in paralyzed limbs as a result. Mental health might be treated in a manner more personalized and more effective as a result.
So now we begin work on extending our work on BIDS to micro-electrode recordings (BIDS-MER). We’ve offered publicly to lead this effort, and the steering committee has accepted.
I’m sure Elon Musk’s latest dalliances, technological and reproductive, will garner more attention. When Google or Meta begin another sweep of every citizen’s behavioral data, the blogosphere will erupt. If Amazon begins dropping packages in urban areas with a cadre of drones, there will be discussions about the implications of access, and consumer demands for immediate gratification. The newest neuro-data standard release will not be met with great fanfare or a ticker-tape parade. In fact, you’ll likely be able to hear a (proverbial) pin drop. We’re here for it. Standards are about delaying gratification and thinking long-term.
Nobel Prizes aren’t won for standards. But civilization is built thereupon. And remember, the next time you see a traffic light, a shipping container, or even a horse’s posterior, the richness of your 21st-century life rests upon them all!
1 Read more here!
2 Heaven forbid a group of academic researchers disagree! (Written as an ex-academic)
3 The Github repo itself is also publicly-accessible.
4 Another repo to be explored!
5 Check out this repo while you’re at it!