[Eeglabnews] Request for letters of support for continued development of EEGLAB software

Tue Feb 14 06:38:38 PST 2017

Dear eeglablist & eeglabnews members,

On March 5 we are planning to submit a renewal proposal to the US National Institutes of Health to support unbroken maintenance and development of the EEGLAB environment [0]. Our proposal will include three major aims:

The first is to further strengthen the EEGLAB core in several ways: We will propose to add and validate more fully automated artifact identification and rejection tools. As EEG is also gradually becoming more oriented towards high-resolution source imaging, we want to make comparisons between ICA and beamforming methods readily available and to introduce more flexible 3-D graphics and higher-resolution source imaging [1] and source clustering methods [2]. As there is currently much interest in brain computer interfaces, we will allow EEGLAB to apply the BCILAB suite [3] of machine learning tools to data from groups of subjects and to apply statistical analysis to the results. We are also planning to add full support for functional connectivity analysis methods collected in SIFT [4] across groups of subjects, both within and also across frequencies of interest.

Our second is to further support meta-analysis of EEG data ('big data') . EEGLAB datasets and studies will be made exportable in the evolving BIDS [5] and containerized ESS [6] data archiving frameworks for easy sharing within and between laboratories. Semi-automated descriptive tagging of events in the HED framework [7] will be supported so users can run meta-analysis on their (and others', when available) data.

Our third aim is to continue to encourage and further develop the EEGLAB user and developer community by building an more extensive Online EEGLAB Workshop site including a series of tutorial videos and of course to continue to fix bugs large and small when they are discovered by the EEGLAB user community.

These aims do not include the EEGLAB release we are planning to roll out before years end incorporating a much more general linear model statistics framework from LIMO [8]. We believe this release will contribute to evolving common practice in processing EEG data. With Canadian partners, EEGLAB will soon run (including graphics) on the open source Gnu Octave environment [9], making EEGLAB usable in environments (including high performance computing) that do not yet support Matlab.

For this renewal proposal to succeed, we want and need to include your letters of support! Without financial support, our full-time support for the EEGLAB project will end.

Below we provide a possible letter template - though your creativity in letter writing may impress reviewers still more!  Letters both from users and from laboratory PIs will be much appreciated; letters from current NIH grant holders are especially welcome! Use of institutional letterhead appreciated.

Please send your letter by March 1st latest, either as a pdf file attachment (to eeglab at sccn.ucsd.edu) or by fax to  +1-858-822-7556.

We thank you again for your support and for your interest in EEGLAB.

Scott Makeig
Arnaud Delorme

Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience 
Institute for Neural Computation
University of California San Diego
La Jolla CA 92093-0559
{scott,arno}@sccn.ucsd.edu

References 

[0]  Delorme, A. and Makeig, S. “EEGLAB: an open source toolbox for analysis of single-trial EEG dynamics including independent component analysis.” Journal of Neuroscience Methods, 134:9-21, 2004.
[1] Akalin Acar, Z., Acar, C., Makeig, S. “Simultaneous head tissue conductivity and independent EEG source location estimation.” NeuroImage, 124: 168-180, 2016.
[2] Tsai, A.C., Jung, T-P., Chien, V., Savostyanov, A.N., Makeig, S. “Cortical Surface Alignment in Multi-Subject Spatiotemporal Independent EEG Source Imaging.” NeuroImage 87:297-310, 2014.
[3] Kothe, C. A., Makeig, S., “BCILAB: A platform for brain-computer interface development.” J Neural Engineering, 10(5):056014, 2013.
[4] Delorme, A., Mullen, T., Kothe, C., Akalin Acar, Z., Bigdely-Shamlo, N., Vankov, A., Makeig, S. “EEGLAB, SIFT, NFT, BCILAB, and ERICA: New tools for advanced EEG Processing.” Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience, V2011, Article 1D:130714, 2010.
[5] Gorgolewski, Krzysztof J., et al. "The brain imaging data structure, a format for organizing and describing outputs of neuroimaging experiments." Scientific Data 3:160044, 2016.
[6] Bigdely-Shamlo, N., Makeig, S., Robbins, K. "Preparing laboratory and real-world EEG data for large-scale analysis: A containerized approach." Frontiers in Neuroinformatics, 08 March 2016,  2016.
[7] Bigdely-Shamlo, N., Cockfield, J., Makeig, S., Rognon, T., La Valle, C., Miyakoshi, M., Robbins, K. “Hierarchical Event Descriptors (HED): Semi-structured tagging for real-world events in large-scale EEG.” Frontiers in Neuroinformatics 2016.
[8] Pernet, Cyril R., et al. "LIMO EEG: a toolbox for hierarchical LInear MOdeling of ElectroEncephaloGraphic data." Computational intelligence and neuroscience 2011.
[9] Eaton, John Wesley, David Bateman, and Søren Hauberg. Gnu octave. London: Network thoery, 1997.

Sample support letter text [please customize freely]:

Drs. Makeig and Delorme,

I am writing to -------- support your NIH application for funding continued development of  your open-source EEGLAB environment for electrophysiological data analysis.

I [and my associates----] have been using EEGLAB in [my|our] research at  ---------------------- 

on ------------------  for ---------------- years  and find it -------------------------.

It is of -------- value in our funded research projects (--- project identifiers -------), 
in particular because -----------. 

We have published results obtained using this toolbox in  -----[journal names]-------.  

My students and I have also found EEGLAB to be valuable for -----------------.

I hope that the open source development model you are promoting for EEGLAB results in continued development of cognitive neuroscience software including  --------------------.  

I am particularly interested in your proposed plan to  -------  [here, select items below or mention other points]
	• improve high-resolution source localization functions, source visualization, and source statistics,
	• develop machine learning tools to process EEG studies
	• add support at the study level for computing connectivity measures at the group level
	• add beamforming methods for comparisons with ICA-based source separation,
	• support external tools and toolboxes that interface with EEGLAB including --------- 
	• support development of toolboxes at both the dataset and study levels, 
	• improve EEGLAB maintenance with increased staff commitment and improved testing tools,
	• continue to develop the EEGLAB user and contributor community
	• continue to support a fully functional compiled version of EEGLAB,
	• add support for running EEGLAB functions on the open source Octave environment
	• support formatting my data to make it easier to archive, share, and to perform meta-analysis across studies
	• further develop the EEGLAB tutorial wiki and the Online EEGLAB Workshop
I have found the documentation you provide with EEGLAB to be ----------. 

I hope you will receive support to continue to refine and develop the EEGLAB environment and to maintain its ability to incorporate the ever expanding number of new  tools contributed by you at UCSD and by many other researchers and  laboratories.

Sincerely,  -------------

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