Step into the world of facial recognition (although with all the computer applications out there already reading your every tic, you ve probably already arrived.
Along with autonomous cars and dinner-delivering drones, facial recognition is one of those dawning technologies that seem nearly as creepy as cool. With algorithms that can read your facial features by sussing out the spacial dynamics of your nose, jaw and cheekbones, you re almost afraid to smile on the street lest someone monitoring you concludes you haven t got a care in the world. Which, of course, you do.
Now comes Microsoft announcing that it plans to move full-speed-ahead into the facial recognition space:
Humans have traditionally been very good at recognizing emotions on people s faces, but computers? Not so much.
That is, until now. Recent advances in the fields of and artificial intelligence are allowing computer scientists to create smarter apps that can identify things like sounds, words, images – and even facial expressions.
The team today announced plans to release public beta versions of new tools that help developers take advantage of those capabilities, including one that can recognize emotion. Chris Bishop, head of Microsoft Research Cambridge in the United Kingdom, showed off the emotion tool earlier today in a keynote talk at , a Microsoft conference on the future of business and technology.
The post on the Next at Microsoft blog says these tools for face-reading applications are designed for developers who don t necessarily have machine learning or artificial intelligence expertise but want to include capabilities like speech, vision and language understanding in their apps.
Put another way, Microsoft would like to help train a de facto army of Big Brothers.
Microsoft released the first set of , and the project s leaders say they quickly drew the interest of everyone from well-known Fortune 500 companies to small, scrappy startups who are eager for these capabilities but don t have a team of machine learning and AI experts in their ranks.
The exciting thing has been how much interest there is and how diverse the response is, said Ryan Galgon, a senior program manager within Microsoft s Technology and Research group.
It gets even creepier, with this headline mid-way down the post:
Emotions, video, spell check and facial hair
And if that doesn t draw in every voyeur on the planet, nothing will.
Utilizing machine learning, these types of systems get smarter as they receive more data; the technology is the basis for major breakthroughs including real-time translation and Microsoft s .
In the case of something like facial recognition, the system can learn to recognize certain traits from a training set of pictures it receives, and then it can apply that information to identify facial features in new pictures it sees.
The emotion tool released today can be used to create systems that recognize eight core emotional states – anger, contempt, fear, disgust, happiness, neutral, sadness or surprise – based on universal facial expressions that reflect those feelings.
So who in the world would want to get their hands on such technology?
Oh, yeah – the marketers!
Galgon said developers might want to use these tools to create systems that marketers can use to gauge people s reaction to a store display, movie or food.
As the post points out, the possibilities are endless!
The facial recognition technology that is part of Microsoft Project Oxford also can be used in plenty of other ways, such as grouping collections of photos based on the faces of people that appear in them.
Or, it can be used for more entertaining purposes. Earlier this week, in honor of the facial hair fundraising effort , Microsoft released , which uses the technology to recognize and rate facial hair.
And can you think of anything more entertaining than facial hair? I certainly can t.
There is, of course, a downside to all of this magical face-reading, as an article in Popular Mechanics points out:
Once in a while, it s nice to be able to blend into the crowd, especially for those who could use a break from being constantly digitally connected. But even away from the computer, it seems, we can t escape our digital personas (and not only when prospective employers stumble into embarrassing online photos).
People are losing control of their own information, Ginger McCall, the Open Government Counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center says.
Using currently available facial recognition technology, Alessandro Acquisti of Carnegie Mellon University has shown that he can link people (in this case, student volunteers) to their Facebook profiles within 3 seconds, just by photographing their face.
If that doesn t give you pause, then smile away. Because they re watching you anyway.
Credit: REUTERS/Bogdan Cristel
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