[Eeglablist] Looking for bcilab tutorials

[Christian Kothe]

Hi Lakshmi,

first a note on the current sources of documentation:

* The quickest way into the toolbox are the tutorial scripts in the
userscripts folder. They illustrate how to set up and run (currently over
40) different computational approaches and exercise perhaps ca. half of the
available components. These also give a good idea of how to use the
scripting interfaces.

* There is no up-to-date GUI tutorial yet (although there are some
walkthroughs for the previous versions on
ftp://sccn.ucsd.edu/pub/bcilab/presentations). I am planning to record a
series of tutorial videos, but have so far not found time for this. Thus,
for the time being, the best way to get started with the GUI is after one
has inspected the scripts (because then one knows what would be the next
step). There is a 1:1 mapping between features available in the scripts and
in the GUI.

* Each component and function of the toolbox is documented individually,
including the internal functions (this help is accessible through the Help
menu), adding up to 100-200 pages of text. This covers nearly all of the
functionality and inner workings of the toolbox in a "bottom-up"
fashion. The key functions and components of BCILAB also each have a list
of short scripting examples that may provide additional in-depth help
(together >200).

* If all else fails, the code of each function is documented fairly
extensively and to a high standard. Thus, if you run into errors, the first
place to took besides the error message is the documentation around the
place where it happened and the documentation of the responsible functions.
To understand the inner workings of the toolbox one would probably need to
read about 20% of the function-level documentation (and to fully understand
all aspects of BCILAB there is currently no better way than glancing over
some of the code-level documentation).

* If you implement your own plugins (e.g. filters, machine learning
methods, BCI paradigms, device I/O), you basically have to look at how the
other components of the respective type are written and take a look at the
documentation for the toolbox features that they are using (e.g., the arg
system or declare_properties). Most of them serve as working examples of
how to build own components for the toolbox.

* There is a relatively up-to-date wiki for BCILAB, which tries to give
a conceptual top-down overview of how some pieces of the toolbox work
together and digs down into how to write certain types of plugins (
sccn.ucsd.edu/wiki/BCILAB). Although it is perhaps the most readable
document, this wiki currently covers only ~20% of the toolbox functionality
(not even talking about particular methods). Turning this into a complete
documentation is currently not within our reach as it basically amounts to
writing a full book, for which we don't have the manpower.

* There are slides of recent talks on the toolbox (some on on earlier
versions) including some theory in
ftp://sccn.ucsd.edu/pub/bcilab/presentations. It is best starting with the
most recent one as the slides have evolved somewhat over time.


Please let me know where your sticking points are with the toolbox so that
I can improve the documentation in those areas (or fix bugs if any) -- at
this stage of development we are very much dependent on feedback from the
community about all these issues from understanding to bugs or missing
features.

Thanks,
Christian

PS: If you are doing research in signal processing or machine learning and
just want to leverage some of the facilities of BCILAB without having to
learn the framework you might also consider using just the components that
you need directly (e.g., cross-validation or some classifiers or filters)
and ignore the layers on top.



Am Donnerstag, 12. Januar 2012 schrieb Lakshmi Nambiar <
lakshmimavila at gmail.com>:
>
> Hello
>
> I am doing my PhD research in EEG signal processing for BCI. I  am using
the EEGlab for the signal processing. When I came to know about the BCI lab
toolbox, I tried using it and I am stuck.
>
> Is there any existing tutorial available for BCI lab similar to the
EEGlab? Could you please share it any documents that can help me
familiarize with the tool. Can can you please send some data that I can use
for processing.
>
> Looking forward for further discussions.
>
> Regards
> Lakshmi
>
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