I am a postdoc at the Hatsopoulos Lab at the University of Chicago focusing on invasive brain-computer interfaces from April 2023.

I had a research internship in Meta as AI Research Scientist Intern from June to September 2022.

I received my PhD in Computer Science in the Brain-Computer Interfaces and Neural Engineering Laboratory at the University of Essex. I investigated the feasibility of brain-computer interfaces for communication based on differentiating different semantic concepts from brain activity from April 2018 to February 2023.

I worked at Spaceknow Inc. from October 2015 to December 2017 as Machine Learning Researcher / Engineer and Software Engineer.

I finished master’s program Artificial intelligence at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University in Prague. Previously, I studied there bachelor’s program General computer science.

I am interested in artificial intelligence and computational neuroscience. My field of interest covers machine learning and deep learning, computational neuroscience, neural networks, evolutionary computation, bio-inspired algorithms, and multi-agent and complex systems.

Contacts

Email: contact [at] milanrybar.cz , milanrybar [at] uchicago.edu
Find me on Google Scholar, ResearchGate, LinkedIn, or GitHub

Recent activity

We published an article Using data from cue presentations results in grossly overestimating semantic BCI performance in the Scientific Reports 2024.

I presented a poster at the AREADNE 2024 titled ‘Propagating spatio-temporal patterns across the primary motor cortex decode kinematics’.

I defended my PhD thesis Towards EEG/fNIRS-based semantic brain-computer interfacing.

We published our topical review of Neural decoding of semantic concepts: A systematic literature review in the Journal of Neural Engineering 2022.

We published our results to Decode semantic categories of imagined concepts of animals and tools in the recorded brain activity by functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) in the Journal of Neural Engineering 2021. See important paper corrections in the published Corrigendum.

We published a conference paper addressing the Potential pitfalls of widely used implementations of common spatial patterns in the 2020 42nd Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society (EMBC).

I presented a poster about my ongoing research at the ECEM 2019 (Essex Cross-Disciplinary Experimental Methods) Conference at the University of Essex.

I am a member of the organising committee for the 11^th Computer Science and Electronic Engineering Conference (CEEC’19) which is held at the University of Essex.

My PhD research topic is Semantic brain-computer interfacing

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) based on identifying activity in the brain related to semantic concepts have the potential to be highly intuitive and allow greater levels of accuracy and communication speed than possible with current BCIs. I will investigate novel machine learning techniques to develop a new type of semantic BCI based on simultaneous recording of electroencephalography (EEG) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS).

Check out my master’s thesis Inspiration-triggered search

The aim of this thesis is to develop an optimization algorithm without a fixed objective function, which mimics creative processes. The proposed method is tested in the domain of images, that is to find complex and aesthetically pleasant images for humans.

Check out my bachelor’s thesis 2D Platform Game Creator

The aim of this thesis is to implement an application for creating 2D games with physics simulation. The game can be created without any programming knowledge. We propose an extendable visual scripting to define the behaviour of game objects.