By Steve Annear

You don’t have to step through Platform 9 3/4 to find out which Hogwarts house is most suitable for your personality.

In fact, you don’t even need to be a wizard—because the magic (OK, it’s actually high-tech science) behind the fanciful sorting hat from the “Harry Potter” series can be found at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Nataliya Kosmyna, a post-doc student at the MIT Media Lab, has created what she calls the “Thinking Cap,” a device made up of noninvasive electrodes that can capture a person’s brain activity and then use machine learning to detect and analyze what they’re imagining in real-time.

The cap is one of several inventions that will be featured at Tuesday’s MIT Computing Expo, an event highlighting innovative projects from the fields of robotics, artificial intelligence, health care, and renewable energy, according to organizers.