UNITED KINGDOM: Researchers look to Darwin for emotional link between man and machine

Record ID: 739590

  • Title: UNITED KINGDOM: Researchers look to Darwin for emotional link between man and machine
  • Date: 1st November 2011
  • Summary: LONDON, ENGLAND, UNITED KINGDOM (RECENT) (REUTERS) COUPLE SMILING AND LAUGHING AS THEY WALK DOWN STREET WOMAN BITING HER NAILS AND LOOKING NERVOUS MAN LAUGHING AS HE TALKS ON MOBILE PHONE GIRL LOOKING ANNOYED AS SHE WAITS
  • Embargoed: 16th November 2011 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: United Kingdom, United Kingdom
  • Country: United Kingdom
  • Topics: Education,History,People,Science
  • Reuters ID: LVA4Y8BYE2EJPDVH7MG6AC97OW2
  • Story Text: Happy, sad, disgruntled, dismayed? How easy is it to tell how someone's feeling just by looking at their face? It's a question that fascinated Charles Darwin nearly 150 years ago, when he carried out pioneering research into human expressions. Now his experiment is getting a modern makeover by Cambridge University, where scientists are putting the test online and hoping the results will help them teach computers to understand their users better.
    In 1868, Darwin would drag his dinner guests to his study to look at a series of photographs of facial expressions by Guillaume Duchenne and ask them to describe what emotions they showed.
    Duchenne claimed he could recreate expressions by using electric probes on facial muscles, but Darwin used the photos in research for his book 'The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals'.
    When Darwin experts at Cambridge came across the experiment amongst his papers, they said they were surprised to see how similar it was to work being done by facial recognition experts at the university today.
    Dr Alison Pearn, associate director of the University's Darwin Correspondence Project, said there were fascinating parallels between Darwin's work and current studies into autism, and work towards developing emotionally aware computers.
    "Are there core emotions? Do we all recognise emotion in the same way? Do we all convey emotion in the same way? Are emotions universal? These are all the same kind of questions that he was interested in. So we thought that it would be a good sort of, bringing things full circle really, that some of the things that are done by the scientists here now build on Darwin's work, so we thought it would be good to put Darwin's work back in to the techniques that are now being used to see what happened," Dr Alison Pearn, associate director of the University's Darwin Correspondence Project, said.
    At the time, Darwin could only collect 24 responses to his experiment. Now, thanks to Dr Peter Robinson and his team at the university's computer laboratory, the experiment is open to millions of people online.
    Their web version of the test lets people around the world look at the photographs at home on their computers, and type in their responses to a database of words describing emotions.
    Robinson, who is working to develop emotionally-intelligent computers, says research into facial expressions has come a long way since Darwin dragged a handful of friends to look at Duchenne's photographs.
    "Well in the 21st Century we can do better, we can actually take video clips, put them on the internet, put them on Facebook, and it turns out there are people around the world with any amount of time on their hands who will then sit there and label these for us and we can get hundreds of thousands of people to do our labelling and get much more accurate labelling of the data, which we can then use to train our computer systems."
    He says the ability to read and understand people's facial expressions and emotions could revolutionise the way we interact with computers.
    "It's an important part of our communication and people who can't read that it another person's face are at a disadvantage - people with autism spectrum disorders. And in that sense, computers are autistic, they don't read those signals in their users' faces. So we've become very interested in the ways that we can allow computers to understand what their users are thinking. This isn't just work stations on the desk, it's the computers that we have embedded in the world around you - things like satellite navigation systems in the car, mobile phones, music players. Computers are everywhere and they just don't communicate with us very well. And we can learn from Darwin how to make them communicate better," he said.
    So with a little help from Charles Darwin, the next time you sigh, shrug or swear at your computer - it may just understand exactly how you feel.
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