In addition to helping better understand how the human brain works, the brain-computer interface neuroscience paradigm allows researchers to develop a new class of bioengineering control devices and robots, offering promise for rehabilitation and other medical applications as well as exploring possibilities for advanced human-computer interfaces.

The Fifth International Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) Meeting met on 3–7 June 2013 at the Asilomar Conference Grounds, Pacific Grove, California, USA. The conference included 19 workshops covering topics in brain-computer interface and brain-machine interface research. Topics included translation of BCIs into clinical use, standardization and certification, types of brain activity to use for BCI, recording methods, the effects of plasticity, special interest topics in BCIs applications, and future BCI directions. BCI research is well established and transitioning to practical use to benefit people with physical impairments. At the same time, new applications are being explored, both for people with physical impairments and beyond. Here we provide summaries of each workshop, illustrating the breadth and depth of BCI research and highlighting important issues for future research and development.

A problem of eye-movement muscular interference removal from EEG recordings is described. In many experiments in neuroscience it is crucial to separate different sources of electrical activity within human body in a situation when a very limited knowledge about nonlinear and nonstationary nature of the mixing process is available. A new two step extension to bivariate empirical mode decomposition is proposed to remove ocular artifacts from EEG with a use of fractional Gaussian noise as a reference first to preprocess EOG signal, which is next used in the second step as a reference to clean EEG signals. Results with EEG experimental data validate the proposed approach.