Word: sejnowski
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...been flummoxed by crude recognition tasks that even a baby can perform, often failing to distinguish between a beach ball and a cabbage, to say nothing of picking out a familiar face in a photo album filled with strangers. Such a pattern-recognition talent, says Salk Institute neuroscientist Terrence Sejnowski, in whose lab the work was done: "is a survival skill humans probably had even before they acquired language. For computers, it's a major challenge...
...around the eyes that accompanies a smile to the contraction of forehead muscles that are an integral part of a scowl. "Some of these movements are so difficult that they're impossible to fake unless you're a very skilled actor," says Marian Bartlett, a post-doctoral fellow in Sejnowski...
...computer's recognition skills by teaching it to identify all 46 muscle actions in the Ekman catalogue. They will then program the computer to recognize the various combinations of these movements, pouring live video images of human volunteers directly into the machine's brain. Eventually, the research at Sejnowski's and other labs could lead to a working lie detector, one that would be far more reliable and much less intrusive than existing polygraphs, which measure such reactions as heartbeat and sweating that clever subjects can control. Says Bartlett: "It would spot in an instant any facial movement that indicated...
Where the technology could go from there is difficult to say, but Sejnowski anticipates big things. Ekman often used videotapes to gauge the emotional states of subjects, once detecting a brief flicker of sadness in the face of a patient who later turned out to be suicidal. A computer like Sejnowski's could have made the diagnosis in real time. Further down the road could be a host of other emotion-measuring computer systems, ranging from smart ATMs that can shut down if they spot a suspicious patron to television systems that can determine if a finger-wagging politician...