Stanford PhD Student | Advancing Brain-Computer Interfaces 🧠 | Decoding the Language of Thoughts 💭
Palo Alto
Joined June 2009
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Chaofei retweeted
🧠🗣️ Ever stumbled over your words, realizing only after speaking them outloud? Your brain might not have followed the plan. New preprint on the neural ensemble organization of speech motor plans and what it means for speech BCIs doi.org/10.64898/2026.04.27.… 1/10
4 yrs ago, I jumped from AI into Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) research—with almost zero neuroscience experience.
Today, I'm at NPTL, one of the world's leading BCI labs, contributing to breakthroughs like restoring speech for people with ALS and developing a robust handwriting BCI.
There's never been a more exciting time to enter the BCI field!
I'm writing a blog about my journey and advice for newcomers.
What questions do YOU need answered?
Ask below 👇
BCI experts & professors: I'd appreciate your retweets to help reach curious newcomers!
@SergeyStavisky @chethan @nishalpshah @NirEvenChen @JonAMichaels @tuxedocat @djseo_ @SussilloDavid @SumnerLN
Chaofei retweeted
Congratulations to @CathyrenOleande for winning the Brain-to-Text Benchmark '24 (eval.ai/web/challenges/chall…). Her entry drove the word error rate down from 9.72% (our baseline) to 5.81%, a substantial improvement! Excited to see what we can learn from this approach and others.
Chaofei retweeted
Our silent speech preprint is live! Using a cross-modal training technique enhanced by LLMs, we set a new state-of-the-art for silent speech (12.2% word error rate, open vocabulary) and brain-to-text (8.9% WER; Rank 1 on Brain-to-Text Benchmark '24) arxiv.org/abs/2403.05583
ALT Anatomical drawing of facial musculature and a steam-punk mechanically-integrated silent speech interface
Chaofei retweeted
Are you a postbac interested in neural engineering / BCIs? 🧠🤖🗣️
Come join our team!! Work directly with our amazing BCI participants.
Great exposure for prospective grad/med school applicants! snel.ai/positions
Chaofei retweeted
If you're attending SfN 2023 and you're interested in speech decoding, come check out my poster on Wednesday morning! We demonstrate a very high accuracy and rapidly calibrating brain-to-text BCI for restoring communication.
PSTR488.12 / JJ23
abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/1…
💭Imagine relying on a brain-computer interface (BCI) for your only means of communication, but it's inconsistent and needs frequent recalibration. For those who can't move or speak, this isn't just frustrating; it's a huge barrier.
🌟Our #NeurIPS2023 paper introduces a promising solution: Continual Online Recalibration with Pseudo-labels (CORP). Over an entire year (403 days), CORP demonstrated remarkable stability in an online handwriting BCI task. With a 6.16% word error rate, it significantly outperforms existing recalibration methods. 🥇To the best of our knowledge, this is the longest demonstration of intracortical BCI plug-and-play stability to date.
⚙️Technical Insight:
1⃣CORP leverages large language models to auto-correct BCI outputs. The outputs are accurate enough to be used as pseudo training labels, enabling unsupervised recalibration without user interruption.
2⃣We also implemented a replay buffer and data augmentation strategies to tackle the challenges of continual learning.
🤝We encourage the research community to build on our findings. Our data and code are open for further research and collaboration.
Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2311.03611
Code: github.com/cffan/CORP
Data: doi.org/10.5061/dryad.hqbzkh…
This work was the result of amazing collaboration with @WillettNeuro, @xoxo_meme_queen, Nick Hahn, Foram Kamdar, Donald Avansino, Leigh Hochberg, Krishna Shenoy, Jaimie Henderson, and our clinical-trial participant T5!
An incredible advancement! This development is a pivotal step toward making speech BCI accessible and usable in our everyday lives. 🧠🗣️
We're so excited that our speech neuroprosthesis project won the 2023 BCI Award! Thanks to all the coauthors for all their hard work @Maitreyee_W @SergeyStavisky @DrDavidBrandman @ca_rrina @BrainGateTeam @neuroleigh @WillettNeuro @pearlsandpython @FanChaofei @JaimieHenderson
Brain-to-speech stands as a compelling new research area, especially since neural activity diverges significantly from audio. Our paper just begins to touch upon the depth of the issue. We invite the community to delve deeper with us
We are publicly releasing all data and code, and are hosting a machine learning competition! Can you do better than us at translating neural activity into text? 2/3 eval.ai/web/challenges/chall…
Chaofei retweeted
Our new study is out today in Nature! We demonstrate a brain-computer interface that turns speech-related neural activity into text, enabling a person with paralysis to communicate at 62 words per minute - 3.4 times faster than prior work. 1/3 nature.com/articles/s41586-0…
Chaofei retweeted
Looks like Sanjay and I have a few TODO items :) :
github.com/tensorflow/tensor…
We are pair programming tomorrow, but already planning to work on something else.
Going through the @TensorFlow code base, it was good to see that @JeffDean and Sanjay Ghemawat are still at it!
Chaofei retweeted
should a love that lasts beyond time
begrudge nights and days
apart?
兩情若是久長時
又豈在
朝朝暮暮
Closing lines from 鵲橋仙 ‘Immortals by the Magpie Bridge,’ by Northern Song Dynasty poet Qin Guan 秦觀 (1049-1100)
#everynightapoem #七夕
Chaofei retweeted
You cannot get educated by this self-propagating system in which people study to pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything.
You learn something by doing it yourself, by asking questions, by thinking, and by experimenting. 🧠
Chaofei retweeted
On the fifth day of the fifth lunar month—#端午Duanwu—we commemorate the death of the poet-minister Qu Yuan 屈原.
Exiled from the kingdom of Chu for his fierce opposition to Qin (which did indeed demolish all, in its imperial ambition), he drowned himself in the Miluo River. 1/
