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Algorithms Determine Mona Lisa's True Emotions
caffeinemessiah writes "The BBC reports that researchers at UIUC and the University of Amsterdam, Holland have used "emotion recognition" software to determine Mona Lisa's true emotions. The algorithm is based on a library of neutral face images of young women and determined that Mona Lisa was 83% happy and 9% disgusted." From the article: "The program, developed with researchers at the University of Illinois, US, draws on a database of young female faces to derive an average 'neutral' expression. The software uses this average expression as the standard for comparisons. The New Scientist says that software capable of recognising emotions just by looking at photographs could lead to PCs that adjust their response depending on the user's mood. "
First time I saw the painting I said "She looks bored ".
.. must not look interested , I don't want to appear easy , but Meooooow"
She had likely been sitting there for hours having her painting done , likely irritated , in need of the toilet and bored .
Perhaps since the knew study is out , we have discovered that Da Vinci painted naked and was fairly good looking . She was probably thinking "Oh dear lord , he is nude . Oh wait , fairly hot body though
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
83% happy and 9% disgusted
and 8% lost, seemingly.
Clippy: Ok man, I was just saying... I should really just go, sorry.
If you disagree then it must be overrated, redundant or trolling.
She did have gas.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
You can find corpuses of human faces taken with different emotions displayed.
Once you've either collected them yourself or downloaded them, you need to use a process called eigenanalysis which is basically fancy talk for analyzing a large dataset with multiple classes (emotions) using matrix decomposition.
I've actually worked on many projects involving this and the result is an eigenface (or eigenmask) that allows you to transform the space that the original image is in and classify it using any of a number of algoirthms that use euclidean distance.
I know I left out a lot but there are many papers out there that you can find on citeseer and white papers floating around out there that provide a lot of reading material on this.
There are also strategies which require tagging certain features as points on the face (like corners of eyes, corners of mouth, center of eye, etc) and then using the relative distances between all these points to determine what classification you would give a new face. The problem with this is that it requires a lot of hand work to prepare the training set.
Hope this helps anyone who wants to learn more about the actual process used to accomplish this recognition.
My work here is dung.
Mona Lisa is a woman, how can any software possibly tell what she is really thinking?
22% hungry and 88% constipated
This of course assumes that DaVinci captured her exact expression... Chances are that the painting just developed that way. Anyone who does art by hand knows that it's not a photograph and that the painting more or less takes on it's own personality as it's being created.
If it were a photo then yes I'd be more apt to accept an algorythmic interpretation of the image.. but paintings take time and it's doubtful that a person feels the exact same way over the course of days or weeks or even months it took for this painting to be completed.
83% happy
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
It's also possible to appreciate and enjoy this science, whether or not you believe the algorithm's results.
Mona Lisa doesn't have emotions. She's made of paint.
I find this story 83% Interesting and 9% Funny.
filmcritic.com - Movie reviews on Internet time
I know what you mean but, every human subjective feeling is quantified in a way. A measure of brain activity will if accurate enough always provide a bridge from the qualitative feeling to a readout of quantitative measure. I'm contrasting the logic of the brain with the physical mechanism. And with that said I still agree with you.
Shh.
To achieve fulfilment, a woman should strive for balance.
So ... on the back of her carriage, Mona Lisa La Giaconda should have had a brass plaque which said
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Art needs two, one to start, and one to reply.
It's meaningless (to society) unless somebody else looks at it, thinks about it, talks about it. The more, the better.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
could lead to PCs that adjust their response depending on the user's mood
Lovely, now clippy can pop up with "You look like you're frustrated as hell with Microsoft Office. Would you like to buy some Microsoft stock?"
Death to clippy!
Interesting to see this idea actually working now. I think I first saw this five years ago on IBM's Alphaworks site. Ah yes, here it is.
http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/393/part2/p icard.html
This tagline brought to you by 1500 monkeys in just under 17 years.
If your computer says "I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you," then you should pull the plug immediately.
I want to try and trick it and simultaneously make all the expressions that i can. I could be 17% happy, 40% confused, and 85% constipated.
--- Caffeine is directly responsible for some of my greatest ideas, and some of my most embarrassing moments...
Thank you science, for trying to take the mystery out of art.
That's assuming the study is logically sound. I didn't see them take into account how the Renessaince culture (with its repressive religious cooncerns and high-society rearings) might affect how emotions were facially expressed.
Is there a chance the facial images have changed over the 1000-1500 years or whatever? I mean, obviously they wouldn't change much, but maybe a little?
More importantly, are we sure da Vinci had regular access to girl's faces? I mean, it was probably mostly guesswork on his part.
"I *could have* played with my pecker all morning and come up with something more useful than this." (emphasis mine)
Eww. I always just discard that stuff, what do you do with it that makes it so useful?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Okay, here are my questions for the Slashdot community:
1) You're writing some code. You call the User Emotional Analysis API, and it reports back that your user is currently "83% happy and 9% disgusted". How should your software "adjust its response" in reaction to this information?
2) What happy/disgusted ratio leads to maximum productivity?
3) What are the odds that the Mona Lisa is a portrait of a Perl programmer?
83% happy and 9% disgusted? And just what does that mean? All of life's greatest mysteries can be solved in a quantitative manner? I for one don't want my computer to act differently if I'm happy, sad, pissed off, stoned, whatever. Just what I've always wanted, a computer with a Genuine People Personality (TM).
Buttons aren't toys.
everything can be quantified
As Einstein said, "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts."
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
(this is actually the first time I play this game, let me know how I'm doing!)
3a. Patent algorithm.
3b. Sue everybody that looks 83% happy or 9% disgusted
This painting was not made in one sitting. Or two. Or ten.
It was never even finished.
The subject, ASSUMING THERE WAS ONE, sat for one or several sessions and then Leonardo continued to work on the painting off and on for the rest of his life.
There is speculation as to who the subject was, but perhaps there was none, and some think it's actually a self portrait in drag (perhaps the cause of the mostly amused but 9% disgusted?)
Could her smile be the result of one of da Vinci's inventions, ie the vibrating commode that the lady in question was sitting upon?
... so now machines are both better than men in bed, and better at knowing how the women feel?
Guys, we're becoming extinct here...
Hope this helps anyone who wants to learn more about the actual process used to accomplish this recognition.
You can bet your purple pants it does!! I can finally put an end this this scenario:
Wife: "no, there's nothing wrong, I'm not mad at you"
muhahahaha.... thats when I take the polariod and get a snapshot
Me: "Yeah right, we'll just see about that!"
Two weeks later the divorce goes through and my ass is on the curb.
E.
Never rub another man's rhubarb - The Joker
On a related note, back in February, I searched Flickr for photos matching the tags Lisa or Mona.
s et-95771/
The results indicate that 9/10ths of the women in these photos are named Lisa. I built
a photo mosaic from the results, which can be seen here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/krazydad/4921613/in/
She has that expression of a woman looking at a naked man and being faintly aroused but also faintly amused at that "last chicken in the poultry shop" display. If your in a long relationship were your girl still fancies you but feels secure enough she doesn't have to constantly worship as a god to keep your ego up you will learn to regonize that look. Oh well it is better then when they break down in laughter while you are trying to pose seductivly. I guess men just aren't designed to look good naked with their socks on.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
My algorithms say this article is 98% BS and 2% Who Cares...
Of course, a number of people suspect that the true model for Mona Lisa was Da Vinci himself. I wonder if the researchers accounted for this?
And by a strange co-incidence most slashdot readers' interactions with women produce exactly opposite results.
-= This is a self-referential sig =-
Launching Firefox...
You're bored...
You're horny...
You're horny...
You're disgusted!
You're horny...
You need a cigarette...
You're bored...
Yes I was searching a commentary on culture to reply, since I have saw a few articles on how the americans and english smile differently. Culture afects many, many things including, apparently, how we express emotions. Sure there is a large "basic emotions" overlap that comes from instinct, we can even recognize them in other mammals, but to get a proper "reading" to a level of 83% happy, 9% disgusted, 6% fearful and 2% angry, that is cited in the article you must take into account culture, I believe.
Another way of testing this would use the program to test several different cultures people. If it holds aggainst the test, then I will be more inclined to believe that the mona lisa was 21% bored or whatever.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
They should make this software available on a camera phone. Next time your girlfriend claims you don't understand here snap her picture and voila, you instantly will be a sensitive man. Anything to keep the dumb cunt happy eh? What?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I got:
44% "Happy"
12% "Baffled"
21% "Knowing lesbian smirk"
19% "Get your hand off my knee, Leo"
55% "Planning to start new religion"
8% "file not found"
I also analyzed the brush strokes and built a picture of DaVinci:
54% "Depressed"
61% "Inventive"
10% "Horny"
30% "That's not my hand, Mona"
71% "Must encode holy grail into here somehwere"
11% "She'd make a good tank"
On a related note, this might also explain the resemblance to Leonardo. Let us say that he did, indeed, have a woman sit for just long enough to sketch in the key facial lines. He would then have needed to add in the skin texture and other features that couldn't have been captured by whatever method he used. It would be logical for him to have used his own face to capture such information. The Mona Lisa would then have been a composite of the original model and himself, which means that it would indeed have a resemblance to him.
X-Ray analysis of the original painting reveals sketches and paintings below the Mona Lisa - though there was no sign of anyone having written "This is a fake" in felt-tip pen, much to the chagrin of Doctor Who fans. It would be interesting to know how the different levels relate to each other - were the earlier pictures earlier versions of the same painting? If they are analyzed with the same software, does it produce the same result?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Maybe someone else pointed this out but the computer isn't really determining her mood, the people who judged all the other faces and constructed the algorithm did it, the computer just did the calculations. But Slashdotters knew that.
90% happy, 10% disgusted sounds like a drag queen to me.
his inability to finish projects he started
Like that helicopter, for instance.