Victory for the IAS-Lab Unipd team at the Cortical Peaks Challenge in Graz

The Neurorobotics group of the IAS-Lab of the University of Padua, made up of the PhD students Paolo Forin, Tommaso Cortecchia and Francesca Virgolini, secured first place in the Cortical Peaks Challenge 2026, as part of the 10th Graz Brain-Computer Interface Conference.

Four European teams took part in the competition: neuroTUM from Germany, NeuroCONCISE from Northern Ireland, MIRAGE91 from Austria and the IAS-Lab Team from Italy, supervised by Professors Stefano Tortora and Luca Tonin (Department of Information Engineering - DEI).

The Graz Brain-Computer Interface Conference is one of the leading international scientific events dedicated to Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs), systems that make it possible to translate brain activity into commands for external devices, creating a direct communication channel between the brain and a computer.  These technologies are at the heart of research in neuroengineering and neurorobotics, with applications ranging from the study of human-machine interaction to the development of assistive technologies for people with motor disabilities.

As part of the conference, the Cortical Peaks Challenge took place, an international competition designed to test non-invasive BCI systems under dynamic, real-time conditions. The objective was to control a series of video games using brain signals alone, without intentionally relying on eye movements, blinking or muscle contractions.

The challenge included five different tasks, designed to assess different BCI control modalities, testing not only the ability to recognise brain activity correctly, but above all the ability to transform it in real time into reliable commands, both discrete and continuous, within interactive scenarios.