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So hello everyone. I hope you can all hear me okay.

We will wait another five minutes and then I will start with the introduction to the course.

Just let's wait another five minutes in case someone is still coming.

Okay.

Okay.

I see that there are not many people. People are still joining so let's wait a few more minutes.

Can you can anyone check? Can you hear me well? If I don't hear anything I guess you can hear me well.

Now I can hear you.

Okay, very good, very good.

Thank you.

A question. A friend of mine is studying physics at KIT in Pasu and he was asking if he can join the lecture.

Yeah, sure, sure.

Okay cool.

Yeah, you can forward him the link.

Okay, yeah.

Yeah, it's open to everyone. I'm just not sure if they can take the exam, external I guess, but they can follow the lectures and come into the class and also doing the presentation.

Nice.

Yeah, because during the course you will also guys do a presentation and some work.

So you can also do that but I'm just not sure if they can be enrolled as a student. But this is something that can be figured out if they send me an email I can forward to the admin.

Yeah, okay, right. Cool.

So at the moment we are 24 participants. Let's wait another minute, and then we start.

It's exciting.

I see that there are many students that are on the waiting list. So, if I mean, maybe we can also forward the link to these students, in case they want to, they want to hear the lectures.

Okay.

So I hope you can all see my screen. And so this is the introduction to the course.

So you probably already had a look at the course, and who I am. So this is a professor, an assistant professor at the new department in artificial intelligence environment engineering, and one of the focus of the department is also to to interface humans

with machines with robots and to study the brain muscle, and how we can reliably interface humans with machines.

So today I will just give you an overall of the course, what we will discuss, and as well give you some highlights, because this is, I wanted, I would like if you get excited about this because I think if you are a young, young student, it is one of the most exciting

in the, I think in the history, because for the first time now technology allows us to record human neural cells, and this is a, and this is a very, this is very important because as soon as we can have an access to these neurons, so the individual neurons

we can study them and interface them with machines. So, the course we will have, we will start with the theory of methods of how we interface human cells, but you know to study this we need to first have a strong understanding of the, of the, I mean, strong, I mean, broad, not like very specific but broad

of the anatomy and physiology and neurophysiology of the motor pathways. So, there is a lot of attention in this course to how interface the part of the brain that controls muscles and muscle forces.

This is a very relevant, and because, for example, you can see after a paralysis that you do not have any more ability to move, we need to find a way to extract the spared neural structure that exists after many injuries, for example spinal cord injury

as we will see later or a stroke, that there are some neural structures that are still alive that we can use to control prosthetic devices.

And also, moving beyond the paralysis, I think this is about a very long term view is once we interface the human brain with, with high grids of electrons, not only the brain but whole spinal cord. You can imagine, because we are interfacing a system that is highly plastic, okay, and you can increase the number of solutions that the brain has.

So, for example, I don't know if you have ever seen in, in, in, there are some families, there are only a few in the world that have six fingers. So this six finger is controlled in a specific area of the brain, and a specific area and a specific muscle in the head.

So this is one proof that the human neuromuscular system can increase the number of dimensions, and you can have, you can now, you know, use your fantasy to think how much we could do in the future.

So this is an example. So this is the current state of the art. This is one. So in this example you see a tetraplegic individual that is paralyzed, and there are two electrons that are recording the activity of the motor cortex with the motor cortex is the part of the

brain that controls function of the limbs. So, so the motor cortex alone, alone encodes a large number of motor dimensions of the head that is moving into space, but this is also done by the spinal cord, but with some training, it is possible to see in this case

that the patient is able, just by thinking, to move this robotic arm, he can move it in space. And this is the, this is very exciting because you can imagine that instead of that, of that robotic arm, it can be an exoskeleton that is attached to the limb of the

brain, and so it will allow the person to grasp again and to move the end again. But as you can see here, there is a, there is a one big limitation, which is due to the high invasivity of the electrodes.