Thursday, February 2, 2017

When Clothes Tell You How to Behave - Science

This is another in one of the favorite Rockhouse categories of Science Going Over the Edge.  (Science Daily:  Wearable AI system can detect a conversation's tone)

It's a fact of nature that a single conversation can be interpreted in very different ways.  For people with anxiety or conditions such as Asperger's, this can make social situations extremely stressful.  But what if there was a more objective way to measure and understand our interactions?

Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Institute of Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) say that they've gotten closer to a potential solution: an artificially intelligent, wearable system that can predict if a conversation is happy, sad, or neutral based on a person's speech patterns and vitals.

- SD


Here's the dream date you have so long awaited.

"Imagine if, at the end of a conversation, you could rewind it and see the moments when the people around you felt the most anxious," says graduate student Tuka Alhanai, who co-authored a related paper with PhD candidate Mohammad Ghassemi that they will present at next week's Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) conference in San Francisco.  "Our work is a step in this direction, suggesting that we may not be that far away from a world where people can have an AI social coach right in their pocket."

- SD

Imagine that, huh.  The future makes your dreams come true, right!


Indeed, the algorithm's findings align well with what we humans might expect to observe.  For instance, long pauses and monotonous vocal tones were associated with sadder stories, while more energetic, varied speech patterns were associated with happier ones.  In terms of body language, sadder stories were also strongly associated with increased fidgeting and cardiovascular activity, as well as certain postures like putting one's hands on one's face.

- SD

Yep, your shirt is now your personal lie detector.  Yahoo!  Now you can be Perry Mason, investigator extraordinaire.


"Our next step is to improve the algorithm's emotional granularity so that it is more accurate at calling out boring, tense, and excited moments, rather than just labeling interactions as 'positive' or 'negative,'" says Alhanai.  "Developing technology that can take the pulse of human emotions has the potential to dramatically improve how we communicate with each other."

- SD

If you connect this lot with psychologists asking incessantly, "What did you mean by that," it could form a closed loop and we wouldn't ever hear from either group ever again.


Welcome to Science Going Over the Edge and please do stay tuned since I'm sure I can find more.  It's not my purpose to ridicule science since I greatly appreciate it but I see no reason to forego any science which needs ridiculing.

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