Slashdot Mirror
Can Machine Learning Guess True Emotions From Facial Microexpressions? (cmu.edu)
jbmartin6 writes: Microexpressions are fast, involuntary facial expressions which other people may not consciously recognize, but arise from our real emotions instead of the face we wish to present to the world. Carnegie Mellon University released an interesting blog entry about new approaches to using computers to recognize these microexpressions with a focus on the security and military applications. If you haven't taped over the cameras on your devices, it might be time to start thinking about it. Just imagine how advertisers would (mis)use this sort of technology.
"Our approach uses machine learning features that treat the whole face as a canvas," writes the lead researcher, adding "One challenge we faced for this project was finding a dataset with accurately labeled data to establish ground truth.
"Few existing databases capture subjects' suppressed reactions...."
"Our approach uses machine learning features that treat the whole face as a canvas," writes the lead researcher, adding "One challenge we faced for this project was finding a dataset with accurately labeled data to establish ground truth.
"Few existing databases capture subjects' suppressed reactions...."
Sounds like lie detectors, with a huge potential for false positives.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
And the problem starts with establishing ground-truth: Those that are into deception will not give you a sample or will taint the data-set intentionally. From the press, I gather that the average human adult lies once every 10 minutes. Sounds too high to me, but still, almost everybody lies regularly and hence almost everybody has reason to taint the basis for ground-truth.
But the fascist fuckers that want people to be completely unable to have secrets will keep trying...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Here's the thing about emotions. They don't mean what you'd expect. Emotions ARE logic to an extent - short-circuited logic, quicker and made with incomplete information. They're the quick-and-dirty half-logic that makes us able to function in a world of unknowns for millions of years as a species.
They aren't 'serious business' - they're formed and dismissed in fractions of a second, and most of them don't trigger facial emotions - and even then a raised eyebrow muscle can mean confusion, pronounced indifference, mild surprise, or just positioning to move your eyeball, or many other things.
Like most things, this ain't mindreading - it's just more polygraph logic being applied, ironically like emotion itself is applied - for the basis of 'asperational truth', or bullshit they hope might pan out.
Ryan Fenton
Well, it'll benefit them more than most people, in that many of them struggle to understand facial expressions at any level.
Sure, it might lead to others misunderstanding them, but fuck it, that already happens.
Well, even assuming that micro-expressions can indeed reflect some mental state, how would you teach an AI that ? It's not like you can have 10000 pictures of people with a valid set of associated micro-expressions... simply because nobody can accurately recognize micro-expressions except in some edge cases. They are very dynamic too, so a picture won't cut it (a video might).
And about the taping of video cameras on PCs, why aren't the LEDs hardwired to the camera: if the camera is ON, the LED is too, not relying on some software to turn it on. Seems like a no-brainer.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
you get a false positive out of it and that lets you get the warrant & probable cause to go on the fishing expedition you wanted to.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
... in some cases, it will return an answer of, "pissed off gorilla."
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Judging from what I saw at NRF in New York City earlier this week the answer is a definite no. Not only did the systems I saw fail to guess my facial emotion but they also decided that I was female. I'm a 53 your old man with short hair and a goatee. It kind of makes you wonder what kind of faces they used to program in what a female face would look like...
I don't think that we are far off but that conference tends to have some pretty decent cutting-edge systems to show off and we are clearly not there yet.
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
Guess accurately? That could be interesting...
How cool would it be to literally have an emoji be part of your password, where the emoji is your literal face, and not some predefined unicode value?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
>Microexpressions are fast, involuntary facial expressions which other people may not
>consciously recognize, but arise from our real emotions instead of the face we wish to
>present to the world.
FYI, that is only a hypothesis, not a universal truth, and there's plenty of evidence against (and debate about) so-called microexpressions and "unconscious emotion." For example, if you place electrodes on people's faces and measure actual muscle movements during emotion, there's tremendous variety, not uniformity. There's also lots of evidence that emotional expressions in the face are neither universal nor innate.
See the recent TED Talk by neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett for a friendly overview.
Whatever the merits of the situation I see a business opportunity for people who make protective cases for cell phones. Simply build one with an easy to install and easy to pop open attached lens cap. "Let 'em eat darkness."
{^_-}