The CORTICO days is the annual meeting of the French BCI community. Although I am doing a lot of computational/theoretical work, BCI remains dear to my heart and I continue working on “decoding the brain”. This year’s edition took place in Paris, at the amazing Paris Brain Institute (whose building looks like a brain, but architectural).
The first day was dedicated to early career researchers. It began with a warm welcome and a manageable chaos at the welcome desk. Being there at this moment was an interesting experience, in particular having your BCI idols introduce themselves to you like they are incognito (when I had already prepared the name tag as soon as I saw them enter the building). Humility in science, we love it. PhD students and postdocs got the opportunity to present their work in the form of posters+flash talks or longer ten-minute talks. There were also keynote lectures, starting off with Laure Tabouy, who launched a great discussion on neuroethics. In the afternoon, Raphaëlle Bertrand-Lalo gave us all the tools to do our best reproducible science. Sylvain Chevallier and Marie-Constance Corsi, this year’s organisers, also invited me to give a talk on networking and science outreach. In spite of some comments overheard at the beginning of my presentation (“who cares??”), it seems that a lot of people got involved in the topic, asking great questions: how to manage our social media presence knowing the ethically debatable practices of the platforms? Which analogies can be used to describe EEG/BCI to your grandma? And the networking experience was fruitful :)
After an intense first day, we all gathered for dinner at one of the famous parisian Bouillons, where we discussed everything from the struggles of finding accomodation in Paris to how, as academics, we are empowered to travel anywhere we want, (almost) anytime we want. We get to choose. This discussion in particular boosted my mood! I left just early enough to catch the last suburban train home, excited for the next day.
Of course, Paris wouldn’t be Paris without its endless troubles on the public transport network. This is how I missed a part of the morning talks of the second day. The senior talks were nevertheless fascinating, from clinical applications of BCI to connectomics aspects, the range of talks covered many trendy interests in the field. The general assembly of CORTICO, which closed the CORTICO days, was preceded by a “throwback” presentation by Camille Jeunet, celebrating the victories within the BCI community: graduations, tenures, grants, but also babies and pets!
So far, I have always felt welcome in neuroscience communities, whether on the computational (Neuromatch, Bernstein conference), the BCI (CORTICO, Neuroergonomics conference) or the more biological (FENS) sides. I definitely ended both of these days with a big smile on my face, a heart-warming motivation to do science, and a lot of new cool people to work with.