When your PC reads your mind
p2p news / p2pnet: You’re sitting at your computer when suddenly, an ad flashes onto the screen. Without any input from you.
Horrifying?
Given advances in computer software and advertisers’ unwholeseome determination to overwhelm you with their offerings whether you like it or not, compulsory viewing could be the coming thing
"People express their mental states all the time through facial expressions, vocal nuances and gestures," says Peter Robinson of the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, quoted in a Royal Society article. "We have built this ability into computers to make them emotionally-aware."
And, "Drawing inspiration from psychology, computer vision and machine learning, our team in the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge has developed mind-reading machines – computers that implement a computational model of mind-reading to infer mental states of people from their facial signals," says Robinson on his Cambridge site describing the project, going on:
"The goal is to enhance human-computer interaction through empathic responses, to improve the productivity of the user and to enable applications to initiate interactions with and on behalf of the user, without waiting for explicit input from that user. There are difficult challenges: it involves uncertainty, since a person’s mental state can only be inferred indirectly by analyzing the behaviour of that person. Even people are not perfect at reading the minds of others; automatic analysis of the face from video is still an area of active research in its own right; and, there is no ‘code-book’ to interpret facial expressions as corresponding mental states."
Using a digital video camera, "the mind-reading computer system analyzes a person’s facial expressions in real time and infers that person’s underlying mental state, such as whether he or she is agreeing or disagreeing, interested or bored, thinking or confused," says Robinson.
Software from Nevenvision identifies 24 feature points on the face and tracks them in real time. "Movement, shape and colour are then analyzed to identify gestures like a smile or eyebrows being raised. Combinations of these occurring over time indicate mental states," says the post, continuing that the relationship between observable head and facial displays and the corresponding hidden mental states over time is modelled using Dynamic Bayesian Networks.
Enter unprompted advertising?
Robinson and colleague Rana el Kaliouby based their application on theory of mind research by Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the autism research centre also at the University of Cambridge.
"Simon’s research provided us with a taxonomy of facial expressions and the emotions they represent," says explains Robinson.
In 2004, Simon published the Mind Reading DVD, an interactive computer-based guide to reading emotions from the face and voice. The DVD contains videos of people showing up to 412 different mental states. Robinson and el Kaliouby developed computer programs able to read facial expressions using machine vision, and then infer emotions using probabilistic machine learning trained by examples from the DVD.
"Machine vision is getting machines to see’, giving them the ability to extract, analyse and make sense of information from images or video, in this case footage of facial expressions," says the story.
"Probabilistic machine learning describes the mechanism of enabling a machine to learn an association between features of an image such as facial expression and other classes of information, in this case emotions from training examples. The most likely interpretation of the facial expressions is then computed using probability theory."
Machine versus people testing showed the computer to be as accurate as the top 6% of people, says the Royal Society post.
"But would we want computers that can react to our emotions?" – Robinson asks. "Imagine a computer that could pick the right emotional’ moment to try to sell you something."
However, he points out, there are applications with clear benefits, "including an emotional hearing aid to assist people with autism, usability testing for software, feedback for on-line teaching, and informing the animation of cartoon figures.
"We have been working since 2004 on a wearable system that helps people with Autism Spectrum Conditions and Asperger Syndrome, with emotional-social understanding and mind reading functions. Meanwhile, el Kaliouby is currently implementing the first prototype at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, says the story.
An "emotionally aware" computer system will be featured at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition and visitors will be invited to help "train" the computer to read joy, anger and other expressions, says the BBC.
Digg this story.
Also See:
Royal Society – Mind reading machines
Robinson – Mind-reading machines, June 23, 2006
BBC – Computers ’set to read our minds’, June 26, 2006
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