Brain–computer interface (BCI) technology has been studied with the fundamental goal of helping disabled people communicate with the outside world using brain signals. In particular, a large body of research has been reported in the electroencephalography (EEG)-based BCI research field during recent years. To provide a thorough summary of recent research trends in EEG-based BCIs, the present study reviewed BCI research articles published from 2007 to 2011 and investigated (a) the number of published BCI articles, (b) BCI paradigms, (c) aims of the articles, (d) target applications, (e) feature types, (f) classification algorithms, (g) BCI system types, and (h) nationalities of the author. The detailed survey results are presented and discussed one by one. [Supplemental materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction to view the free supplemental file: Supplementary Tables.pdf.]

In this paper, a new algorithm for the multimodal function optimization is proposed, based on the particle swarm optimization (PSO). A new method, named the multigrouped particle swarm optimization (MGPSO), keeps basic concepts of the PSO, and, thus, shows a more straightforward convergence compared to conventional hybrid type approaches. Moreover, the MGPSO has a unique advantage in that one can search N superior peaks of a multimodal function when the number of groups is N. The usefulness of the proposed algorithm was verified by the application to various case studies, including a practical electromagnetic optimization problem