EE Faculty Colloquium by Prof. A G Ramakrishnan

Title: Analyzing patterns in EEG: from biometrics to altered states of consciousness

Speaker: Prof. Ramakrishnan A. G., MILE Lab, Dept of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Science

Venue: EE MMCR

Time: 4pm, 21 October 2022

Abstract: The electrical activity of brain, the key control organ of our body, carries a lot of information about our current activity, health, mental status and identity. We, in MILE Lab, have been focussing for the past few years on analysing the various patterns present in the electroencephalogram (EEG). When someone is in deep sleep, coma or under anesthesia, the level of consciousness is lower than that of waking state. When someone has locked-in syndrome, the level of consciousness is the same as that of waking state. On the other hand, during meditation, the consciousness level is higher than that of waking. Hypnosis is another completely different altered state of consciousness. The interrelationship between the different EEG channels is also distinctly different during inhalation, breath-hold and exhalation. We are studying the patterns in EEG under all the above conditions. While working on the above topics, we unexpectedly made a discovery that some measures based on the functional connectivity between the channels are distinct for each individual and can very well be used to identify people. Using other measures, we are also able to predict the word imagined by a person out of a set of words.

Speaker bio: Ramakrishnan A. G. is a professor of Electrical Engineering and an associate faculty member at the Centre for Neuroscience. He obtained his Masters in Electrical Engineering and Ph D in Biomedical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. He has graduated 19 Ph.D.s, 16 M.Tech.s by research, and guided over 100 M. Tech. projects at IISc. He is a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering, As the leader of a research consortium, he was instrumental in creating handwriting recognition technologies for eight Indian languages. He received Manthan award (South East Asia and Asia Pacific) twice for creating audio books for blind students through his OCR and TTS in Tamil and Kannada. His current areas of research include speech recognition in Indic languages, decoding of imagined words from EEG, brain functional connectivity analysis in modified states of consciousness and the study of the neural control and physiological mechanisms behind the health and therapeutic effects of deep breathing. For his earlier work on evoked potentials from leprosy patients, he had received Sir Watt Kay Young Researcher’s Prize from the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons, Glasgow. He was a Senior Research Scientist at Hewlett Packard Research Labs, Bangalore India from May 2002 to August 2003. 

He is an invited member of the Senate of IIIT-Allahabad, Prayagraj and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry – Indian Language Internet Alliance. He was a member of the Knowledge Commission, Government of Karnataka during 2017-2020. He is also one of the founder directors of RaGaVeRa Indic Technologies private limited recognized by Karnataka Government as one of the Elevate 2019 Startup winners. The Kannada TTS developed by RaGaVeRa has been evaluated to be better in quality than Google’s Wavenet TTS and Nuance’s Kannada TTS. He is also the Advisor-Neuroscience of Feedfront Technologies Pvt Ltd, Bengaluru.