Can Facial Expressions Designate Presence Info?
from the seems-tricky dept
There are some customer support phone systems these days that claim they can recognize if someone is angry or raising their voice (or simply cursing at the hold music) — but that’s only the tip of the iceberg for having more advanced systems recognize your state. For many years, people have talked about how “presence” was going to change everything. If you could somehow let your computer know if you were busy or tired or free or whatever, perhaps it could help better prioritize everything that might interrupt you. While things like instant messenger do have some amount of presence information built in — it’s still mostly reliant on the user setting things (or noticing that you haven’t done anything for a while and setting you to “idle”). However, there’s been a lot of research done over the years about having computers and phones better recognize when you can and can’t answer a call. Of course, it’s quite a difficult problem — and some new researchers are tackling a related issue by trying to teach a computer system to recognize what your facial expression means. Rather than using this system to keep you from being bothered when you’re in a pissed off mood, though, it sounds like they’re looking to pitch you depression medication when you’re feeling down. Forget behavioral advertising, it’s time for emotionally targeted advertising. However, they are looking at some additional applications, such as having a camera that monitors your face while you drive and tries to keep you alert if your face starts to appear bored. Of course, last time we heard about a similar plan from IBM — about five years ago — the system was supposed to tell you jokes and squirt water on your face (yes, you would have an automated Bozo the Clown riding shotgun). It’s not clear that much has really changed over the years — as these projects always seem to be continually in the future.
