Seminars, Workshops and Conferences
Wednesday, May 12, 2004: EMPATH: A Computational Model of Human Facial Expression Recognition seminar will be conducted by Dr. Matthew Dailey, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California at San Diego, USA. The seminar will be held at 10:00 a.m. in Room CS-209, Computer Science Building. Interested persons are welcome.
For further information on Dr. Matthew Dailey, please visit: http://www.cse.ucsd.edu/users/mdailey/basic.html
Abstract:
Understanding how humans (consciously or unconsciously) communicate emotion through facial expressions is important for both the design of
advanced human-machine interfaces and the field of psychology. Some machines, such as care-giving robots, would be more effective if they could modify their behavior based on their user's emotions as induced by a computational model. For psychology, computational models can potentially clarify how different theories about facial expression recognition might be implemented in the brain, thus sharpening the long, intense debate in the community.
The lecture, will describe EMPATH, a system that makes progress on both fronts. EMPATH is a statistical model that learns, through training, to classify static facial expressions as either happy, sad,
afraid, angry, surprised, or disgusted. We find, somewhat surprisingly, that relatively simple yet biologically plausible image processing and machine learning techniques yield a system that
performs as well as naive humans in psychological experiments. But even more surprisingly, the model also matches a large variety of psychological data on categorization, stimulus similarity, reaction
times, stimulus discrimination, and recognition difficulty, both qualitatively and quantitatively. These results suggest that many of the seemingly complex psychological phenomena related to facial
expression perception need not be seen as so complex after all.
Monday, May 17 and Tuesday, May 18, 2004: Gender, Development and Public Policy in an Era of Globalization conference will be jointly held by Gender & Development Studies, SERD, AIT, the Institute of Social Studies (Women, Gender & Development Department), the Netherlands and the University of Leeds (Centre for Development Studies Department), UK. The conference - to be held at the AIT Conference Center - is aimed to provide an international forum for researchers, scholars, academics and activists to discuss public policy in various fields within the development arena.
All interested faculty, staff and students are invited to attend the conference opening ceremony on Monday, May 17, 2004 at 9.00 a.m. in the AIT Conference Center Auditorium, as well as the scheduled technical sessions on (i) gender, conflict, migration and human security; (ii) gender, human rights and social policy; (iii) gender, economic development, technology and enterprise; and (iv) gender, environmental resource management.