Lucas C. Parra

Office Hours

All students wishing to talk to me must come to my office hours: Thursdays 3:30PM - 4PM. No appointment required.

Calendar

All others wishing to set up a meeting please consult this calendar, and send an email with suggested dates and times. (Full day entries indicate that I am not available that day.) Thank you.

Education

1985-1995: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München, Germany
Ph.D. in Physics and Computer Science, 1996

Affiliation

08/2003 - Current: City College of New York - Professor of Biomedical Engineering
03/2002 - 07/2002: Columbia University - Adjunct Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering
04/1997 - 07/2003: Sarnoff Corporation - Technology Leader, Adaptive Signal and Image Processing
04/1995 - 03/1997: Siemens Corporate Research - MTS, Imaging Department

Research Interests

The general area of interest is how temporal information of natural stimuli is encoded and processed by the brain. Experimental techniques focus on interpreting and modulating brain activity in humans non-invasively using electro-encephalography and trans-cranial electrical stimulation, in short: "reading" and "writing" the brain with electric fields. The work is often coupled with auditory and visual psychophysics and always incorporates computational or mathematical models.

Publications

See here: complete list sorted by year with PDF files, demos and code.
See here: most cited papers sorted by number of citations. (Google Scholar Hirsch Index: 27)

In the News

The study on audiovisual speech recognition was featured in

• "Blinded by the lyric? Study reveals why we get the words wrong", MSNBC web site, Health Section (March 27, 2009)
• "Talking in person better", American Morning, CNN (March 4, 2009)

Our work on brain-reading technology has generated some interest in the popular media:

• Mind Reading Machines, Discover Magazine (October 2011)
• BreakOut!: Your Brain's Search Engine, Forbes.com Video Network (January 2010)
• Documentary: The Brain, History Channel (November 10, 2008)
• "Tapping the Computing Power of the Unconscious Brain" IEEE Spectrum Video (August 2008)
• "A Brainy Approach to Image Sorting", IEEE Spectrum (April 2008).
• "When the brain is a component of the computer", Politiken (Danish newspaper, July 2007).
• "Brain-Computer Interfaces: Where Human and Machine Meet", IEEE Computer Magazine (January 2007)
• "Subliminal Search", MIT Technology Review (July 2006)
• "Man and machine vision in perfect harmony", New Scientist, (July 2006)
• "This Is a Computer on Your Brain", Wired News (July 2006)

Teaching Experience

BME I5100 Biomedical Signal Processing (3 credits, graduate)
BME I5000 Medical Imaging and Image Processing (3 credit, graduate)
BME 22000 Biostatistics and Research Methods (3 credits, undergraduate)
BME 50500 Image and Signal Processing in Biomedicine (3 credits, undergraduate)

Current Research Topics (Collaborators)

Tinnitus modeling and psychophysics (Barak Pearlmutter, UNI; Glenis Long, CUNY)
EEG single-trial, real-time analysis (Paul Sajda, Columbia)
Effects of electric fields on endogenous network activity (Marom Bikson, CCNY, Lisa Marshall. Univ. Luebeck)
Bird song learning (Ofer Tchernichovski, CCNY)
Neural correlates of perceived confidence (Mariano Siegman, Univ. Buenos Aires)

Current Students

Justin Rice, Postdoc
Jacek Dmochowski, Postdoc
Davide Reato, Ph.D. candidate
Joao Dias, Ph.D. candidate
Belen Lafon, Ph.D. candidate
Yu Huang, alias Andy, Ph.D. candidate

Former Students

Xiang Zhou, Ph.D. in BME 2010.
Yuzhuo Su, alias Suzy, Ph.D. in BME, 2010.
Christoforos Christoforou, Ph.D. CS, 2009.
Mads Dyrholm, Postdoc, 2006-2007
Christopher Alvino, MS, 2001-2002

Lucas C. Parra
Herbert Kayser Professor of Biomedical Engineering The City College of The City University of New York
Steinman Hall, T-403C
212.650.7211
212.650.6727
parra @ ccny.cuny.edu
Parra Lab [..]