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Κάποτε το να έλεγες σε κάποιον που βρίσκεται στην αντίπερα όχθη του Ατλαντικού,ότι θα του μιλάς από το pc και ότι θα σε ακούει και θα σε βλέπει ταυτόχρονα,φαινόταν με σενάρια επιστημονικής φαντασίας,τώρα η τεχνολογία έχει προχωρήσει παραπέρα και μας παρουσιάζει τα pc που θα διαβάζουν τη σκέψη μας,απλά και μόνο "βλέποντας" το πρόσωπο μας.

Computers 'set to read our minds'

An "emotionally aware" computer system designed to read people's minds by analysing expressions will be featured at a major London exhibition.
Visitors to the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition are being invited to help "train" the computer how to read joy, anger and other expressions.
Its designers say there are potential commercial uses, such as picking the right time to sell someone something.
But it may also help improve driver safety and help people with autism.
The computer, which is connected to a camera, locates and tracks 24 facial "feature points" such as the edge of the nose, the eyebrows and the corners of the mouth.
A total of 20 key facial movements - including a nod or shake of the head, a raise of the eyebrow or a pull on the corner of the mouth - have been identified.
Combinations of these movements, which are thought to represent underlying emotions, are then fed into software and used to detect the same facial combinations in real-life situations.

Subtle variations

Peter Robinson, professor of computer technology at the University of Cambridge, said: "The system can already cope with the variation in people's facial composition; for example, if you have a round or thin face, or if you wear glasses or have a beard.
"However, there are small variations in the way people express the same emotion."
The scientists have been "training" the recognition system by using actors to make different facial expressions. They hope the exhibition will generate valuable new data to improve the programme's ability to read faces.
Professor Robinson added: "Our research could enable websites to tailor advertising or products to your mood."
For example, he explained, software linked to a webcam could process a person's image, encode the correct emotional state and transmit the information to a website, which could then display products or advertising.

Dashboard aid

The technology is also being developed for use in cars to improve driver safety. The team is recording the faces of volunteers in driving situations and monitoring facial movements to identify more complex expressions linked to confusion, boredom or tiredness.
"We are working with a big car company and they envision this being employed in cars within five years," Professor Robinson said, adding that a camera could be built into the dashboard.
The team is also working with colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop a wearable version of the system, to help those with conditions, such as autism and Asperger's syndrome, who have particular difficulty in reading other people's facial expressions and emotions.
The headset, which is at its first prototype stage, would interpret other people's moods and communicate those to the wearer.

πηγή:BBC news

Mind reading machines

Can you read minds? The answer is most likely yes. You may not consider it mind reading but our ability to understand what people are thinking and feeling from their facial expressions and gestures is just that. 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. We have built this ability into computers to make them emotionally-aware'.
The ability to attribute mental states to others from their behaviour and then to use that information to guide our own actions or predict those of others is known as the theory of mind'. Although research on this theory has been around since the 1970s, it has recently gained attention due to the growing number of people with Autism conditions, who are thought to be mind-blind'. That is, they have difficulty interpreting others emotions and feelings from facial expressions and other non-verbal cues.
Peter and his colleague Rana el Kaliouby based their computer program on the latest research in the theory of mind 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', explains Peter. 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 as many as 412 different mental states. Peter and Rana developed computer programs that can 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. 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 of this system has shown the computer to be as accurate as the top 6% of people. But would we want computers that can react to our emotions? Such systems do raise ethical issues', says Peter. Imagine a computer that could pick the right emotional' moment to try to sell you something'. There are, however, 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', says Peter. Rana is currently implementing the first prototype of the system at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab'.

Dr Rana el Kaliouby
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Professor Peter Robinson
University of Cambridge

πηγή:The Royal Society

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