NEW AI DETECTS YOUR EMOTIONS BY SCANNING YOU WITH RADIO SIGNALS
rael-science
NEW AI DETECTS YOUR EMOTIONS BY SCANNING
YOU WITH RADIO SIGNALS
ITS CREATORS SAY IT'S ACCURATE 71 PERCENT OF THE TIME.
- FUTURISM
Checking In
If
new research is to believed, you may find yourself coming home from
work one day in a rotten mood — just to have your smart speaker automatically scan your emotions and start to play soothing music.
That’s
one use case for a new neural network that Queen May University of
London engineers taught how to automatically interpret certain human
emotions — by blasting people with radio waves and picking up on
emotional cues like changes in their heartbeat. The algorithm can detect feelings including fear, disgust, joy, and relaxation with 71 percent accuracy, according to research published earlier this month in the journal PLOS One. That’s far from perfect, but impressive enough that it could find some real-world use in our lives.
Black Hat
The
algorithm is trained to pick up on changes in a person’s heartbeat, as
detected by the radio waves, and interprets them as specific feelings, according to Defense One.
Unsurprisingly, the military-focused publication was interested in
whether the system could be used in an interrogative setting, but lead
author and Queen Mary engineer Yang Hao said that wasn’t quite the
point.
“As
for its implications to… national security, more research needs to be
done, just like other issues concerning ethics and responsible use of
this technology,” Hao told Defense One.
Learning Curve
Of
course, 71 percent accuracy isn’t quite ideal, but the research does
show that the neural network significantly outperforms other, less
sophisticated AI architectures.
For
instance, a more traditional machine learning algorithm only guessed
right about 40 percent of the time, according to the study. So while we
don’t have machines that understand the complex, subjective experience
of human emotions, we’re at least getting closer to tools that help us
decode them.
READ MORE: New AI Can Detect Emotion With Radio Waves [Defense One]
