The Think System
From: PC Magazine - January 2008 - page 86
By: Eric Griffith

The term cyborg conjures up at best images of a six-million-dollar man (when
bionics were cheap) or, at worst, California's "Governator" with his skin
peeled off. "I'd say we're already to some degree cyborgs, a human-technology
symbiote," says Microsoft researcher Desney Tan, referring to everything from
contact lenses to cochlear implants to hip replacements. His team, including
cognitive neuroscientists and a couple of medical doctors, is tackling
human-computer interaction to bring out the cyborg in all of us. 

Controlling a PC by thinking is just one area the researchers want to
understand. Making the computer understand you is also key. "If I'm
concentrating on a particular task, maybe the machine should know and not
allow interruptions with calls or e-mail," says Tan. The brain can parallel
process with the best of them, too, according to Tan, so it's possible you
can work away while the computer feeds you other information. 

"The human physiology is vastly untapped," says Tan. So how about loaning out
your brain? Tan describes Human Aided Computing as a "fun project" with no
application as yet, but it will come. Think of it as distributed computing -
where people loan out their computer's CPU cycles to do some intensive work
while the PC is otherwise idle - but using those unused brain cycles instead.  

"We'll figure out how to productize it someday," adds Tan. 

From:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2243164,00.asp

Figure:
http://common.ziffdavisinternet.com/util_get_image/17/0,1425,sz=1&i=176604,00.jpg

Figure caption:
Thinking for Control
Behold the latest human-computer interface fashions.

Links:
Images of Desney Tan’s EEG equipment and lab setup
http://www.technologyreview.com/player/07/09/TR35Tan/1.aspx

Desney S. Tan
http://research.microsoft.com/%7Edesney/
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~desney/
http://www.cortechsolutions.com/Snapshot_Tan.htm

Physiological Sensing and Inference
http://research.microsoft.com/vibe/projects/bci.aspx