Seyed Yahya Shirazi, Ph.D. | NINE Lab

NeurIPS 2025 EEG Foundation Challenge Now Open

Wed, 10 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The NeurIPS 2025 EEG Foundation Challenge is now open for submissions! As one of the organizers, I’m excited to invite the global research community to participate in this groundbreaking competition focused on advancing cross-task and cross-subject EEG decoding.

Challenge Overview

This challenge aims to push the boundaries of EEG analysis by developing foundation models capable of generalizing across different tasks and subjects. Participants will work with large-scale EEG datasets to create models that can:

Decode EEG signals across multiple cognitive tasks
Generalize to new subjects without extensive retraining
Handle the inherent variability in EEG data

Key Dates

Challenge Opens: September 2025
Submission Deadline: November 2025
Winners Announced: December 2025 at NeurIPS

Why Participate?

This challenge represents a unique opportunity to:

Contribute to advancing EEG analysis methodologies
Work with unprecedented large-scale EEG datasets
Compete for prizes and recognition at NeurIPS 2025
Collaborate with leading researchers in neuroscience and machine learning

Get Involved

For more information and to register, visit the official challenge website. We look forward to seeing innovative approaches that will shape the future of EEG analysis and brain-computer interfaces.

Meta Awards $130K Grant to Support Open Science at SCCN

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I am excited to announce Meta’s generous gift to the Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience. This unrestricted gift will enhance our efforts to promote open science and expand our comprehensive toolset, including EEGLAB, to encompass other modalities such as sEMG.

As co-PI on this grant, I am particularly grateful to Alexandre Gramfort for his unwavering advocacy for open science. This $130,000 award represents a significant investment in our mission to develop and maintain open-source tools for the neuroscience community.

The funding will support:

Enhancement of EEGLAB’s multimodal capabilities
Integration of sEMG (surface electromyography) analysis tools
Continued development of open science infrastructure
Training and educational resources for the global research community

This partnership with Meta underscores the importance of industry-academia collaboration in advancing scientific research and ensuring that powerful analytical tools remain freely accessible to researchers worldwide.

Age-related Reorganization of Corticomuscular Connectivity During Locomotor Perturbations

Sat, 28 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Download

Paper
Code and data available upon request

Abstract

Locomotor perturbations elicit cortical and muscular responses that help minimize motor errors through neural processes involving multiple brain regions. The anterior cingulate cortex monitors motor errors, the supplementary motor areas integrate sensory and executive control, and the posterior parietal cortices process sensorimotor predictions, while muscles show increased activation and co-contraction patterns. With aging, these neural control strategies shift; older adults demonstrate less flexible cortical and muscular responses, using compensatory overactivation and simpler muscle synergies to maintain performance comparable to young adults. We investigated corticomuscular connectivity patterns during perturbed recumbent stepping in seventeen young adults (age 25±4.9 years) and eleven older adults (age 68±3.6 years) using high-density EEG (128 electrodes) and EMG from six bilateral muscles. Brief mechanical perturbations (200ms of increased resistance) were applied at left or right leg extension-onset or mid-extension during continuous stepping at 60 steps per minute. We applied independent component analysis, source localization, and direct directed transfer function to quantify bidirectional information flow between cortical clusters and muscles in theta (3-8 Hz), alpha (8-13 Hz), and beta (13-35 Hz) bands. Young adults demonstrated concentrated electrocortical sources in anterior cingulate cortex, bilateral supplementary motor areas, and bilateral posterior parietal cortices, with strong theta-band synchronization following perturbations. In contrast, older adults showed fewer differentiated cortical sources, particularly lacking distinct anterior cingulate activity, and exhibited only minimal synchronization changes. Baseline corticomuscular connectivity was significantly stronger in older adults compared to young adults (p=0.012), suggesting fundamental differences in resting motor control states. During perturbations, young adults employed flexible, task-specific connectivity modulation involving error-processing networks, with the anterior cingulate showing selective bidirectional connectivity changes with specific muscles. Older adults relied on more diffuse (i.e., not focused to specific brain area) connectivity patterns dominated by motor and posterior parietal cortices, with strong connections to multiple upper and lower limb muscles simultaneously. These findings reveal an age-related strategic reorganization from dynamic, error-driven neural control to a more constrained, stability-focused approach that may reflect compensation for sensorimotor changes. The distinct connectivity signatures establish perturbed recumbent stepping as a valuable tool for assessing corticomuscular communication and provide normative benchmarks for developing targeted rehabilitation interventions to restore efficient motor control in aging and neurological populations.

Key findings: Young vs. older adult corticomuscular connectivity

Citation

@ARTICLE{Shirazi2025-cmc,
  title    = "Age-related Reorganization of Corticomuscular Connectivity During
              Locomotor Perturbations",
  author   = "Shirazi, Seyed Yahya and Tasin, Shahamat Mustavi and Huang,
              Helen J",
  journal  = "bioRxiv",
  pages    = "2025.09.28.679054",
  month    =  "28~" # sep,
  year     =  2025,
  doi      = "10.1101/2025.09.28.679054",
  language = "en"
}